Nurse Carter

Inspiration

One of the most impactful results of this current global pandemic for me has been the movement of government services online in Trinidad and Tobago. I've been looking out for this and advocating for it wherever I can. My advocacy though involved more than just complaining about things. I wrote chatbots for our national water service, our parliament and even the ministry of health. All voluntary and all focused on demonstrating how technology can augment public service delivery. When I saw this hackathon I was interested in specifically marrying that motive with information on COVID-19, and thus my submission was developed.

What it does

Nurse Carter provides a simple interface to query information about public health services in the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Along with that information, details about the response to COVID-19 from a public service perspective is also available. It essentially provides and on-demand, focused way of understanding COVID-19 as well as available public health services.

How I built it

I used the Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure and other open source tools to construct the chatbot.

Challenges I ran into

Ideally, this should work on a number of channels, that is, Facebook, Google Assistant and Alexa. However, each channel requires considerable testing and support.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Providing a conversational interface into health services in Trinidad and Tobago.

What I learned

Testing channels is important.

What's next for Nurse Carter

Finding a better way to tie in to the health service graph. Talk to the ministry of health about using the COVID-19 information we've collected to share more up to the minute news, and allow interested people to subscribe for updates.