According to a meta-analysis study by the British Medical Journal, only 68.4% of the population is willing to receive COVID-19 vaccination globally. That is a low figure considering vaccines can eradicate diseases and save lives. There are 2 major reasons behind this.
Firstly, people living in majorly unvaccinated areas, tend to never get the vaccine as they are not pushed by their neighbors or feel pressure from those around them.
Secondly, people who aren't aware of the correct facts regarding vaccines and immunization often believe in misinformation and myths. This leads to them repelling the COVID-19 vaccination.
A mobile app that incentivizes the process of getting people to take the vaccine. The app will provide users with redeemable credits if they can get someone from nearby unvaccinated areas to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The app will show nearby locations and statistics regarding vaccination rates. The user can then choose to go to one of these locations and help someone over there. Once they've decided to help get vaccinated, the user can upload their vaccination certificate to earn redeemable credits.
We used Flutter to build the mobile app and Node.js to build the API for it. We also used MongoDB as the database. Additionally, we used Google Maps Android SDK which was something new for us.
As we informed earlier, we weren't really familiar with Google Maps Android SDK and had to read all the documentation for it as our implementation of it was really complex.
An app like ours would lead a lot of people who were earlier reluctant to get vaccinated to go out and get their doses. As the vaccination rates increase in districts and cities soon there would be a stage of herd immunity which would mean that enough people are vaccinated for the disease to have less effect on those with lesser immunity eventually leading to the culmination of the disease in that area.
If we get our app to a significant userbase, we can continue using the verification and navigation features of the app for vaccines related to other diseases or viruses.
We learned about new technologies like LocationIQ and Postition Stack API along with Google Maps Android SDK. We also polished our skills using Flutter.
The app will make money through the following streams:
- Affiliate Commission - There would be a shop inside the app where the user can purchase slots for different vaccines. We plan to tie up with these different vaccine manufacturing companies to get us affiliate commission if someone purchases their product through our platform.
- Ads - We as developers don't like ads and know that they sometimes ruin the user experience, although we also know that earning regular revenue for our business model is important. Hence, ads would be placed in the app if our revenue from affiliate commissions falls short.
We plan to make it more accessible and available for other regions as we were only able to make it for our region (India) right now.
This project won the Runner up prize at Explore Hacks 2021. The UI which was designed by Samvrant led to us winning the Best UI Prize as well.