#Data4Good: Find an At-Home COVID-19 Test Kit Near You

Michael Thomas — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 23:42:12 +0000

Overview of My Submission

We built a web application using the Shiny framework from the R programming language to help users locate & report at-home COVID-19 test kits. You can check out the web app live in action here for the State of Connecticut!

This app works very similar to the Waze app, in that the data that populates the app is entirely user-driven. Through the UI, users have the ability to add a new record to the back-end MongoDB Atlas database (i.e., where/when they saw COVID-19 at-home test kits in stock), and remove a record (where/when they saw COVID-19 at-home test kits out of stock).

The purpose of this project spawned from seeing so many disjointed Facebook forum questions/answers about where people could find at-home COVID-19 antigen test kits. There was no single place to centralize this information -- so we set out to build just that!

Furthermore, we wanted to open-source this effort, so that anyone can reproduce this app to serve their own town/state/region/country/etc.

Submission Category:

Choose Your Own Adventure

Link to Code

ketchbrookanalytics / covid_test_spotter

Shiny web application for locating and reporting inventory of COVID-19 at-home test kits

CT COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter

The goal of the CT COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter app is to allow users to locate and report the availability of at-home COVID testing kits at retail locations in their state.

It works very similar to the Waze app, in that the “reports” data is entirely user-driven.

The app opens to the “Home” page, which displays the most recently reported test kits available in retail locations:

When the user clicks either the green or red buttons at the top of the page, they are taken to a form prompting them to submit information about when and where they saw test kits in or out of stock:

Installation

Clone this repository to your local machine
Open the covid_test_spotter.Rproj file from the directory on your local machine where you cloned this repository. This should install the {renv} package if you do not already have it installed, but…

View on GitHub

Additional Resources / Info

As stated in our overview, you can check out the web app live in action here, tailored for the State of Connecticut.

This projects utilizes a really neat combination of R, Shiny, Google Maps & Places APIs, and MongoDB Atlas to provide a seamless user experience that serves as a benefit to the public. See for yourself in the screenshot below:

We have already gotten amazingly positive feedback about how this app helped people in our local community find an at-home COVID-19 test kit that they had been desperately searching for. We sincerely hope that the project only continues to grow -- and winning the MongoDB + DEV Atlas Hackathon would be a tremendous help to ensure that it does.

Forem: Michael Thomas