Pandemic Management System

Developed for Cameroon Government

The Client

The Republic of Cameroon is a country in west-central Africa. With a population of nearly 25 million people, the country was severely affected by the Covid 19 pandemic that hit the world in 2020. In Cameroon, from 3 January 2020 to 5 July 2022, there have been 120,068 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 1,931 deaths reported to WHO. As of 25 June 2022, 1,838,907 vaccine doses have been administered.

The Scenario

Like most countries, the pandemic affected the Republic of Cameroon very severely. In the beginning phase of the pandemic, Cameroon was among the top five countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the first in central Africa regarding the number of confirmed cases. From the very early stages, Cameroon strategically faced the pandemic with the objective of reducing viral transmission in the country. The Cameroonian government has made effective initiatives and calculated decisions, including contextualized mitigation measures and a bold testing strategy incorporating rapid diagnostic tests.

The health departments identified that the manual contact tracing mechanisms are ineffective. Many countries have resorted to contact tracing in the wake of COVID-19. In China, around 9,000 contact tracers were employed in Wuhan alone. The Canadian government has also initiated a contact tracing program, which garnered around 27,000 volunteers. However, using contact tracers to manually identify the primary and secondary contacts exposed to the virus can take a very long time. Health authorities must sit down with the patients and ask them questions. These interviews can be extremely inaccurate as they rely heavily on the patient’s memory. This traditional method is highly inefficient and not at all scalable. Moreover, the end-to-end management of the various health initiatives and pandemic management was chaotic due to the lack of a common platform that could be used by the health departments, government officials, citizens, and healthcare workers.

The Requirements

To curb the pandemic effectively, the government required an information highway, a platform that can be used by all stakeholders, including health departments and citizens. Following were the key requirements put forward by the Government.

The Solution

To solve the challenges raised by the pandemic, Accubtis closely worked with the Government of Cameroon to deploy an end-to-end pandemic management system. The solution is deployed by customizing RebuildTheChain, a pandemic management system launched by Accubits.  The solution can enable the government to effectively curb the pandemic with large-scale and automated contact tracing, exposure analysis, spread probability analysis, self-diagnosis, and case management. It also facilitates a digital health card-based access system that can help the government to revive the struggling economy.

The solution consists of 2 components. One is the user-side mobile application, and the other is an admin-side dashboard. The user-side mobile application is available on iOS and Android platforms. The Admin side dashboard is a web application accessed from any web browser.

The solution is built using sensor fusion technologies(Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and cell phone triangulation) to accurately perform contact tracing and human-to-human exposure analysis. Since the solution also uses cell phone triangulation, it can perform contact tracing for people without smartphones, facilitating extremely accurate tracking. If an infected person walks into a restaurant and touches any surfaces like handrails, door handles, benches, etc., or any objects like a menu card, POC device, etc., the virus could be transmitted to these surfaces and could remain on that surface based on the above-mentioned points. In the meantime, another person could come to the same restaurant and interact with any of these surfaces to be exposed to the virus. The solution automatically calculates these exposures and dynamically creates dynamic micro hotspots; users are alerted to maintain distance from such hotspots; also, these infrastructure owners could be notified to disinfect these infrastructures. This is an extremely important component of exposure analysis that is ignored by most software systems.

The solution is architected with Apache Hive, which is a data warehouse system built on top of Apache Hadoop that facilitates easy data summarization, ad-hoc queries, and the analysis of large datasets stored in various databases and file systems that integrate with Hadoop, including the MapR Data Platform with MapR XD and MapR Database. Hive offers a simple way to apply structure to large amounts of unstructured data and perform batch SQL-like queries on that data. Hive easily integrates with traditional data center technologies using the familiar JDBC/ODBC interface. The solution can process upto 1.6 PB data/day. It can horizontally scale to accommodate 2.6 billion people continuously commuting every day.

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Highlights

Sensor fusion technologies

Privacy preserving contact tracing

Big data processing 1.6 PB data/day

Horizontally scale to accommodate 2.6 billion

Technologies Used