Theme

Healthcare

Problem

With India’s coronavirus crisis becoming increasingly more desperate and beds, medicine, and oxygen supplies scarce, people in cities across the country are relying on Twitter and the kindness of strangers for help during a time of national upheaval.

The above extract is from this article by the Washington Post about how the COVID crisis in India is growing out of proportion resulting in a shortage of resources and communication gaps between the suppliers and the people in need. All of this is resulting in people tweeting asking about the availability of oxygen cylinders and other medical care resources in their area.

The problem is that many of these tweets don't get 100+ retweets or likes and are hence not being noticed by people who have resources or leads. Many of these tweets are being ignored for hours and hours without getting even a single reply.

This is demoralizing for the person who posted the tweet and is directly or indirectly hurting the person for who the resources are being asked.

Solution

Seeing how in this lockdown, everyone is working/studying from home and are able to spare a minimum of 1-2 hours per day for leisure activities, we decided to put their idle time to use to solve the above-mentioned problem.

Our solution is a gamified experience that gives the user redeemable credits based on how many people they help. The system shows the users specific tweets which are asking for leads about COVID resources and the users get redeemable credits according to how much they can help the person by verifying leads and replying to that tweet.

Flow

  1. User signs in with the Twitter account

  2. The user's username and auth token is stored

  3. The user then is supposed to read the starting instructions

  4. The user can then press the "start session" button to start the session.

  5. A session consists of tweets that will be shown to the user one at a time.

  6. These tweets which will be shown will be ones asking for covid resources and would be the latest ones since we would be streaming them in real-time.

  7. There will be buttons on the screen along with the embedded tweet. Those buttons will be "skip" or "help".

  8. If the user presses "skip" then the next tweet appears on the screen.

  9. But if the user presses the "help" button then:

    1. A templated message with fillable blanks would be provided to the users in which they have to enter specific information regarding whatever lead they have.
    2. Here's the template we are going to provide:
      • Tweet Reply Template
    3. All of this information would be required for them to put in their reply to earn COVICoins.
    4. If they decide not to reply in the template then a lesser amount of COVICoins would be earned.
    5. Once they have replied, they need to press the "verify reply" button which will send a request to the API which will check the authenticity of the reply. If the reply is authentic and has all the required information then the system adds the earned COVICoins to the user's account.

    Here's how we are going to verify their tweets:

    Here's how we are going to prevent spam: