Created in just 8 hours, this Hack won 3rd Place at the Facebook Humanitarian Hackathon
With over a billion people on Facebook, we are more than ever, connected.We share our days and lives with each other, but also our germs. We all get sick.
Flu is a serious illness that still kills many and still doesn’t have a cure. It’s the virus that can’t be stopped and gets ugly when things go wrong.
With this hackathon we’re addressing the lack of in-depth, meaningful data collection about the connection between flu and human relationships.
Current data collection methods are on a large scale – region-wide trends are gathered by filtering through Google Search Data – but the web has become social. Information is connected to People, and People are connected to people.
Knowing that there is Moderate Flu Activity in Oklahoma is simply not useful.
Our MVP for this hackathon is our version of Real-Life Plague. By connecting to your Facebook account, you can track and record which of your friends you have made ill. They can then track who they’ve infected and so the graph grows.
From the User’s perspective: It’s Emotional Chicken Soup. It’s a tangible way to track accessible data in your network, in your area.
For our Partner organisations (eg. the CDC or WHO): It’s a way to intelligently track real-time flu data based on personal relationships. It’s a way to see how long strains are lasting, and how fast they are spreading.
Scalability
The idea coexists symbiotically with Facebook technology and allows for literal viral growth through personal word-of-mouth recommendations. If your sister snuffly tells you about the app, you’re going to download it.
What’s next?
This is a way to track length infection, symptoms, temperature, mood, medicine – and see how effective things are by observing the data yourself.
Effectively, we will have developed a way to pinpoint the dangerous strains of flu as they happen, where they happen, who they happen to.
Humanitarianism is about helping people when things go wrong, and so when disaster strikes, we have a way to pinpoint patient zero.
This hackathon entry received 3rd Place at the Facebook Humanitarian Hackathon.
My personal responsibilities included: Idea Generation, Information Architecture, Wireframing, UI Design, Front-end Development and Delivering the Presentation.