App allows comparisons in rate of spread of COVID-19

  • April 20, 2020
App allows comparisons in rate of spread of COVID-19

Picture credit: 3D medical animation still shot showing the structure of a coronavirus. Source: https://www.scientificanimations.com/wiki-images/

Dr Pradipta Biswas' team in India has created an app that shows the rate of spread of COVID-19 in different regions.

The app is part of our institutional effort to propose various solutions during the lockdown period as we have all been working from home since mid-March.

Dr Pradipta Biswas

Scientists based in a Gates Cambridge Scholar’s lab at the Indian Institute of Science have developed a new app which shows the rate of spread of COVID-19 across different regions.

The “COVID-19 Comparative Data Analytics” app provides a mathematical analysis which enables comparisons of the spread of COVID-19 between different regions and countries.

The app, developed as a remote collaboration by Dr Pradipta Biswas’ Intelligent Inclusive Interaction Design (I3D) laboratory, can be used to compare COVID-19 statistics across different countries and also provide state-level statistics for India.

It calculates the spread of the coronavirus based on the duration of spread and the rate of increase of cases.  For India, it pulls data on the total number of deaths, the number of confirmed cases per day and the number of deaths per day from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s “Covid-19 India” website. For other countries, it takes data from a GitHub site which tracks worldwide data from over 50 portals and sites, plus the Worldometer website which collates worldwide coronavirus figures.

It then applies a special “Knee Detection Algorithm” which allows it to show the rate of the spread for the disease across different regions. The shape of the graphs can be use to compare the spread of the virus at different stages and for different countries with respect to the average number of new cases and deaths. It can be used to undertake comparative analysis among countries, automatically detect and compare phases of spread across different countries and prevent spread by taking examples from other countries.

Pradipta [2006], who is Assistant Professor at the Institute’s Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, says: “The app is part of our institutional effort to propose various solutions during the lockdown period as we have all been working from home since mid-March.”

Pradipta Biswas

Pradipta Biswas

  • Alumni
  • India
  • 2006 PhD Computer Science
  • Trinity College

Pradipta Biswas is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing of Indian Institute of Science. His research focuses on user modelling and multimodal human-machine interaction for aviation and automotive environments and for assistive technology. Earlier, he was a Senior Research Associate at Engineering Department, Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Research Associate at Trinity Hall of University of Cambridge. He completed PhD in Computer Science at the Rainbow Group of University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Trinity College in 2010 and was awarded a Gates-Cambridge Scholarship in 2006. He undertook a first degree in Information Technology at the University of Kalyani and a master degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He conducts a course on Human Computer Interaction at Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, guest lecture at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and was a vice chairman of ITU-T Focus Group on Smart TV.

Latest News

What does it mean to see the world as a zero-sum competition?

It’s an age-old question: Why don’t people cooperate even when it is in their best interest to do so? It’s also an urgent question as we face huge global challenges mired in conflict and polarisation. A new paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers fresh psychological insights into this question through the lens […]

Breaking through the health boundaries

Ghufran Al Sayed was beginning her clinical work as a medical student in Manchester when Covid hit. Like many medical students at the time, she was redeployed onto Covid wards and the experience was hugely challenging. It also made her rethink what she wanted from a career in medicine. Ghufran’s parents had raised her with […]

New thinking for education leaders

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has co-authored a new book which is being described by leading educationalists as transforming the way schools think about change. The Pruning Principle offers a new approach to educational leadership, drawing inspiration from horticulture to address the chronic issues of overwork and inefficiency in schools. The authors, Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Simon […]

A passion for biotech innovation in Africa

Taryn Adams has long been interested in bridging the gap between science and business in order to ensure science has practical, useful applications. Coming from South Africa, she says the innovation that results from linking science and business, particularly in biotech, is still in its early stages, but she feels there is room to make […]