Ghanaian software engineering company, Cognate Systems have launched an application to assist health officials to effectively trace contacts in a bid to stop the sread of COVID-19 in Ghana.
The application, Opine Health Assistant tracks Coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms and provides data and visual insights for disease surveillance teams, public health experts and other stakeholders in real-time.
The platform is community-driven and as such relies on feedback from the population.
It is accessible through USSD: Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, on any mobile device.
“Cognate Systems has offered to give this platform to the Ghana Health Service at no cost to help fight the Coronavirus pandemic,” a statement from the company said.
To access the platform in Ghana, dial the USSD short code *920*222# or *714*444# on your mobile phones and then follow the prompts to answer questions about symptoms and other risk factors.
“USSD was chosen because it removes many of the barriers to accessing the system in such a critical moment. USSD is widely accessible across the country; it does not require internet access; it does not incur network charges for users; it does not need any installation of an app and so users do not need to have a smartphone,” a press release from the company said.
The platform was piloted in March 2020 after identifying the need for such an innovative system before Ghana recorded its first Coronavirus cases.
Opine Heath Assistant has built-in data analysis tools to help health and data experts make sense of the symptoms reported by the public in real-time. The data is visualized spatially on maps with filters that can highlight symptoms of interest.
Charts and dashboards are available to help monitor key risk factors and to help with finding patterns within the data. This makes it easy for stakeholders without data analysis expertise to get the required insights for decision making. These features of the platform are driven by the team’s range of expertise in software engineering, data science and artificial intelligence.