Development of an Android application for viewing Covid-19 containment zones and monitoring violators who are trespassing into it using Firebase and Geofencing
Abstract The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 as pandemic across the world. With its alarming surge of affected cases throughout the world, lockdown and awareness (social distancing, use of masks etc) among people are found to be the only means for restricting the community transmission. In a densely populated country like India, it is very difficult to prevent the community transmission even during lockdown without social awareness and precautionary measures taken by the people. Recently, several containment zones had been identified throughout the country and divided into red, orange and green zones, respectively. The red zones indicate the infection hotspots, orange zones denote some infection and green zones indicate an area with no infection.This paper mainly focuses on development of an Android application which can inform people of the COVID-19 containment zones and prevent trespassing into these zones. This Android application updates the locations of the areas in a Google map which are identified to be the containment zones. The application also notifies the users if they have entered a containment zone and uploads the user’s IMEI number to the online database. With this IMEI number, the police can keep an eye on the people who are frequently violating the lockdown rules. To achieve all these functionalities, many tools and APIs from Google like Firebase and Geofence are used in this app. Therefore, this application can be used as a tool for creating further social awareness about the arising need of precautionary measures to be taken by the people of India.