App allows LGUs, businesses to monitor, trace individuals

WITH the rising cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in Cebu, a team of developers composed of students, faculty members and alumni from the University of San Carlos has introduced BirdsEye, a contact tracing app developed by volunteers.

BirdsEye is a centralized application for local government units (LGUs) and businesses to monitor and trace individuals using visited places, transportation used, temperature and symptoms reported.

“LGUs have their own management panel where they can see the specific problem areas. This will help them make an informed decision on which areas to lock down. Law enforcement agents are able to scan users to see their health status,” Kennette Canales, project leader of BirdsEye, told SunStar Cebu.

Canales said that every user is given a QR (quick response) code that will be used to gather data.

“Ideally, if a person was to visit an establishment or stopped at a checkpoint, his QR code will be scanned, his health status will be viewed and that place will be added to his visited places. If you went to the same place with someone who is discovered to be Covid-positive at a later date, your health status on the dashboard will reflect that,” he said.

Canales said they are working on contacting LGUs and engaging them in correspondence, but none have reached out of their own volition.

“We’ve mainly been focusing on Cebu City, Mandaue City and Lapu-Lapu City, although we have contacted other LGUs in Cebu Province,” he said.

He said BirdsEye is extremely simple to use for the general public and law enforcement.

“Most of the complicated parts of the app are in the administrative modules (for LGUs, businesses etc.),” he said.

The application has features like location matching and mapping that match and map specific visited places of individuals to visited places of affected ones.

Examples are visited markets, malls, coffee shops and more.

There is also transportation matching and mapping that match and map previously used transportation by individuals to the affected ones. Examples are plane flights, buses, ships, private cars, carpools and more.

Another feature is temperature management that monitors and manages the temperature of individuals every after reading using any thermal scanner.

It can also be used for patients’ recording that record patients considered as patients under investigation, persons under monitoring, positive or negative, as well as the deceased. Once a patient’s status is updated, then all places he visited and transportation he used will also be updated.

There is also a mass testing recording that allows authorized users to manage and monitor the implementation of the mass testing and record and update test results. If a user’s results are still pending, they are to self-quarantine until their results are available.

One important feature is the contact tracing that allows the Department of Health and government agencies to have a bird’s eye view of all locations, number of individuals and modes of transportation.

There is also symptoms reporting that encourages individuals and allows the barangay level to report symptoms; a unique auto-generated QR code for each registered user will allow for easier scanning and recording of the user’s information such as transportation used, visited places, patient details, and temperature history and live alerts that send e-mails/notifications to administrator accounts when scanned results are not clear the past 14 days.

It also has a health declaration form that requests customers to fill in the health declaration. This is required for hotels and restaurants as required by the Department of Tourism and optional for other industries.

It also links employee accounts to the main business account to track their health status and keep the business safe.

It can also be in multiple branches and locations as it can add and assign building, branch or office to employee accounts. The business owner can also print the generated QR code to the location entrance.

The group can be accessed at www.birds-eye.org for more information. (JOB)

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