[Twilio Hackathon Submission] A location based Covid-19 WhatsApp Tracker for India 🇮🇳

Aditya Bose — Fri, 01 May 2020 06:48:32 +0000

Motivation 💡

There is an ocean of information about COVID-19 on the Internet, but WhatsApp still remains the primary medium for clutter-free information and communication for a vast majority of people.

What I built 🚀

A location based WhatsApp bot powered by Twilio that helps users track COVID-19 cases from all over India, as well as get information about essential services to help them be better prepared to deal with the pandemic.

Category Submission:

COVID-19 Communications, Interesting Integrations

Features

Get country and state-wide statistics 📉
- Cumulative total, active, and new cases since last update.
- Number of patients confirmed, recovered, and deceased.
Share your WhatsApp location 📌
- Get localized statistics on the number of cases.
- Get distance from the closest detected active case.
Find essential services around you 🏥
- COVID-19 testing labs.
- Emergency healthcare services.
- Free food.
- Mental well-being and emotional support.
- Delivery services (vegetables, fruits, groceries, medicines).
- Government / NGO helplines.

Demo

To start interacting with the bot, send a WhatsApp message to Twilio's default shared Sandbox number +1 415 523 8886 with the join code came-told.
Below are the screenshots of an interaction with the bot:

Country and State-wide Statistics

Localized cases

Essential Services

Link to Code

Github

How I built it

Tech Stack

Twilio API for WhatsApp
Flask microservice framework / Python 3.8
OpenStreetMap Nominatim

The project is developed using Python3.8 with the Flask web microframework, and uses Twilio's Programmable SMS API for WhatsApp.
To offer the location based features of our bot we used the geopy OpenStreetMap library.
We used Heroku as our platform to build and deploy our code to Production where we used Gunicorn as our web server.
To send and receive messages with users, we Twilio's Sandbox for WhatsApp configured with our Heroku app's URL endpoint as a webhook.

To get more detailed instructions on how to set up and run the project locally, and deploy it on Production, checkout the README.md file from the project repository link above.

Additional Resources/Info

Covid-19 India API: A volunteer-driven, crowdsourced database for COVID-19 stats & patient tracing in India
Twilio API Docs for WhatsApp: Official Twilio Documentation for the Programmable SMS API for WhatsApp.

DEV Community: Aditya Bose