Checkon.Life

Project Info

Team Technocrats thumbnail

Team Name


Team Technocrats


Team Members


Caity , Ilia , Walter Lim , William Seagar , Minh , Olaf Wrieden , Jackson and 1 other member with an unpublished profile.

Project Description


To say 2020 has been a challenging year would be an understatement! We’ve seen in our communities that some people are struggling more than others; with about one quarter of kiwis struggling to find government covid information, with a large factor being an excess amount of information. To stay afloat and up to date on what’s happening in your suburb there is a glut of information, “fake news”, and social media sharing.

We want to help the 1M+ kiwis struggling to find information during the COVID emergency period, and all the other emergencies life might be throwing at us this year. Everyone needs, and deserves, access to correct information on how to protect themselves and their families.

Meet Checkon – the status page for your suburb. At a glance users can easily see the status of core services in health, safety, utilities, and much more. Checkon aggregates data from over 20 trusted sources, ranging across government and private institutions. The data is timestamped and sourced users can have faith in what they are reading – helping combat the misinformation divide in a world where over 50% of kiwis say they don’t have high faith in news media.

The major benefit of Checkon comes in the NZ leading level of data aggregation, and in the smart use of machine learning which makes learning about your suburb’s status even more impactful. Checkon utilises machine learning in two ways – the first to prioritise what statistics are more relevant to the reader given the current emergency situation (or lack thereof), and the second is to gauge sentiments (positive/negative/neutral) on leading news stories. This allows us to show users with a bird’s eye view of the media landscape, making staying up to date less overwhelming.

When warnings or restrictions are in place Checkon links users directly to the authoritative resources and actions they should take, enabling people to take action in an educated way. This technology allows members of our community to keep their families safe and follow official government guidance. That helps unify our nation’s response to COVID, raising our response ability, and readies us for the next emergency. Our information aggregation quells anxiety, bridges the disinformation gap, and provides an authoritative voice to counter conspiracy theories.

Checkon.life makes staying informed accessible and easy. Check it out!


#covid19 #webapp #aotearoa #data #aggregation #dashboards #government #supermarkets

Data Story


Starting GovHack 2020 we proposed a simple question, is national emergency data easily available for regular people? How about information that's calming and reassuring in times of panic, such as does my local supermarket have toilet paper?

The answer within our group was a strong no, and we found the same results when surveying members of our community. All national emergency data is spread far and wide across various government organisation websites, most too complicated for average people to understand. There was no quick and easily accessible way to check on the pulse of our nation.

We built Checkon to aggregate over 20+ data sources from trusted government agencies and third parties to provide a simple one page live status check of your local area. With Checkon you can see the current COVID-19 alert level, weather warnings, latest earthquakes, power grid outages as well as a variety of other indicators which show the status of your local area.

We were able to build this system by integrating with publicly available government and private API’s and from publicly accessible websites. We used a responsible data collection policy of running all data collection processes as background tasks on long timers to not cause unnecessary traffic to our data sources.


Evidence of Work

Video

Homepage

Project Image

Team DataSets

Ministry Of Heath - News Feed

Description of Use Provides a feed of news from Ministry Of Health which is displayed under the health section of the app.

Data Set

Skyscanner - Flights Data

Description of Use Polled Skyscanner API to find number of flights being offered in NZ and displayed an indicator about the level of flights being offered.

Data Set

NZTA - Traffic Data

Description of Use Polled current Auckland traffic data to provide an indicator in our web app if traffic is congested.

Data Set

ICU Beds - Ministry Of Health

Description of Use Show number of ICU beds and hospital data in web app.

Data Set

NZ Police Alerts - RSS Feed

Description of Use Show latest security alerts from NZ police in web app under security section.

Data Set

Stuff News - RSS Feed

Description of Use Used latest news articles from to both display links to in app. Also passed article data to AWS comprehend to perform sentiment analysis on latest news articles and displayed that back to users.

Data Set

LINZ - New Zealand Localities

Description of Use Used fire and emergency NZ localities to pull out a list of all NZ suburbs. Users can pick which suburb they want data on in web app.

Data Set

LAWA - Air Quality

Description of Use Air quality data set from LAWA. Used to display if the air quality in your region is within a safe level.

Data Set

Watercare - Water Outages

Description of Use Polled water outage data from Watercare's API. Displayed in web app if there are any major outages.

Data Set

Vector - Power Outages

Description of Use Web scraped power outages in Auckland from Vectors websites. Displayed in web app to show if there are any major power outages.

Data Set

Vodafone - Internet outages

Description of Use Web scrapped from Vodafone and displayed in our web app to show if there are any major internet outages.

Data Set

Spark - Internet Outages

Description of Use Web scrapped from Spark and displayed in our web app to show if there are any major internet outages.

Data Set

Watercare - Dam levels

Description of Use Polled from the watercare API and used to display if water levels are OK and displayed in our web app.

Data Set

GeoNet - Earthquake data

Description of Use Polled from the Geonet API to show if there are any earthquakes with a MMI rating larger than 6 in our web app.

Data Set

Metaweather - Weather Data

Description of Use Polled weather data from Metaweather to show in our web app if your region is currently experiencing extreme weather.

Data Set

LAWA - Water Quality

Description of Use Polled from the LAWA API and aggregated to show in our web app what water quality is at various swim sites.

Data Set

Countdown - Toilet Paper and other essentials

Description of Use Web scrapped from the countdown website and displayed in our web app to show if essential goods are in stock.

Data Set

Covid 19 Alert level

Description of Use Web scrapped from the offical COVID-19 website and displayed in our web app

Data Set

Challenge Entries

Caring for the Aged in COVID Times

How can we reimagine the aged care experience

Go to Challenge | 18 teams have entered this challenge.

Identifying government investment for enhancing community safety

How can governments apply resources so as to proactively address social issues before they escalate and require reactive interventions (e.g. social work, law enforcement etc.)?

Go to Challenge | 16 teams have entered this challenge.

Responding to the next regional, country or world emergency

How can we better respond to the next regional, country or world emergency by leveraging emerging technologies and the plethora of government datasets available?

Go to Challenge | 5 teams have entered this challenge.

Thinking Outside the Box

This challenge is about showing your artistic side. Use data to create something artistic which fits into any of the 2020 GovHack Themes

Go to Challenge | 5 teams have entered this challenge.

Keep it Out, Stamp it Out, Manage it, or Recover from it

How might we create a hack that could help New Zealand Keep It Out, Stamp It Out, Manage It, or Recover From a pandemic?

Go to Challenge | 6 teams have entered this challenge.