DSSBadge+ | Devpost

Some Examples
The Current Daily Symptom Survey
The Issue
Our Solution

Background

What is a DSS?

The Daily Symptom Survey (DSS) is a minute-long survey that promotes a mindful check-in on a person's symptoms and evaluates whether or not they are approved to access campus facilities. The survey combats the spread of both COVID-19 and the Flu, while also acting as a tracker to ensure students, staff, and faculty are compliant with the campus testing requirements.

Why is the spread of COVID-19 worrisome despite having access to masks and effective vaccinations?

Unfortunately, the authorized vaccinations have shown to wane in efficacy over time, especially as the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolves and alters its structure. Any individual, healthy or at risk, is capable of developing long-term disease (commonly referred to as "Long COVID") that can have negative physical and mental health effects. The infection may also spread to vital parts of your body--especially the lungs.

How can the current pandemic come to an end in our community specifically?

Everyone must do their part in reducing the spread of COVID-19 by getting tested regularly, wearing highly effective masks (KN95, N95), completing the DSS, and quarantining when necessary. It is a community effort.

Inspiration

Many students, faculty, and staff are non-compliant with the campus testing requirements and have found many creative ways to create counterfeit survey results--also known as DSS badges. This work-around threatens the health of the community as asymptomatic individuals may be unknowingly spreading COVID-19 or the Flu.

What it does

This new DSS system uses DSS badges and adds alternating seals to survey results for tracking results made on different days. Each day has a different badge seal set to ensure a person's survey was filled on that specific day.

DSS is a simple package intended to be implemented into a website back-end to generate secure symptom survey results. It aims to prevent counterfeit DSS badges and contagious people from entering Davis facilities.

How we built it

Our project was built using Python, and image editing programs like Pillow and Numpy. It is published on GitHub, and we worked on the code together using VSCode and VSLive.

Challenges we ran into

Our group only had one programmer, so we were bottle-necked several times when he was stuck somewhere with the code. Our other two members are majoring in Biochemistry, creating an interdisciplinary team that required delegating tasks that matched the appropriate skill sets of each of our members.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As our project is a package intended to be implemented elsewhere, we spent a lot of time and detail writing docs and comments thoroughly explaining our package and how to use it. We are proud of this aspect, as well as our professional git and commenting practices.

What we learned

Our group learned a lot about different aspects that go into making the Davis campus more secure and the effort Campus Ready has put into creating Daily Symptom Survey badges for everyone on campus. We have also all become much much more familiar with GitHub, markdown, and professional commenting practices.

What's next for DSSBadge+

We hope that DSSBadge+ brings inspiration for improvements to the current daily symptom survey. It is strongly encouraged that these changes can be implemented to prevent further tampering with survey results and safer environments for the UC Davis community. It's a step in the right direction because frequent testing allows for the implementation of proper spread-preventative measures to eventually allow the UC Davis community to return to that sense of normalcy everyone has been eagerly seeking the entire duration of the pandemic.

Built With

Submitted to

HackDavis 2022

Created by

I am a biochemistry major with little experience in coding as this is my first hackathon. I assisted with creation of the presentation and description using my science background knowledge. I also added suggestions to further enhance the project from my background in working in a research lab surrounding covid-19.

Maggie Chen
As the only programmer, I wrote all the code and much of the documentation for DSSBadge+. It was my job to take our groups ideas and intentions and transform them into a working package.

Kyle Pickle
As an Aggie Public Health Ambassador and a Biochemistry major with interest in epidemiology, I developed and came up with the idea for the project. I assisted with the creation of the presentation as well. I wrote the background information and guided the programmer based on my epidemiological knowledge.

Michael Tsortos