A citizen science initiative for open data and visualization of COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala, India

  1. Jijo Pulickiyil Ulahannan
  2. Nikhil Narayanan
  3. Nishad Thalhath
  4. Prem Prabhakaran
  5. Sreekanth Chaliyeduth
  6. Sooraj P Suresh
  7. Musfir Mohammed
  8. E Rajeevan
  9. Sindhu Joseph
  10. Akhil Balakrishnan
  11. Jeevan Uthaman
  12. Manoj Karingamadathil
  13. Sunil Thonikkuzhiyil Thomas
  14. Unnikrishnan Sureshkumar
  15. Shabeesh Balan
  16. Neetha Nanoth Vellichirammal
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Abstract

Objective

India reported its first COVID-19 case in the state of Kerala and an outbreak initiated subsequently. The Department of Health Services, Government of Kerala, initially released daily updates through daily textual bulletins for public awareness to control the spread of the disease. However, this unstructured data limits upstream applications, such as visualization, and analysis, thus demanding refinement to generate open and reusable datasets.

Materials and Methods

Through a citizen science initiative, we leveraged publicly available and crowd-verified data on COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala from the government bulletins and media outlets to generate reusable datasets. This was further visualized as a dashboard through a frontend web application and a JSON repository, which serves as an API for the frontend.

Results

From the sourced data, we provided real-time analysis, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases in Kerala, through a user-friendly bilingual dashboard (<ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://covid19kerala.info/">https://covid19kerala.info/</ext-link>) for non-specialists. To ensure longevity and reusability, the dataset was deposited in an open-access public repository for future analysis. Finally, we provide outbreak trends and demographic characteristics of the individuals affected with COVID-19 in Kerala during the first 138 days of the outbreak.

Discussion

We anticipate that our dataset can form the basis for future studies, supplemented with clinical and epidemiological data from the individuals affected with COVID-19 in Kerala.

Conclusion

We reported a citizen science initiative on the COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala to collect and deposit data in a structured format, which was utilized for visualizing the outbreak trend and describing demographic characteristics of affected individuals.

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