Covid-19 Symptom radar
Symptom Radar is an online service that maps the number of people in Finland who are experiencing symptoms possibly caused by Covid-19. Developed by the digital engineering company Futurice and the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the service provides open data to scientists on how the coronavirus may be spreading in Finland.
Process
When the coronavirus reached Finland, the testing capacities didn't provide a comprehensive understanding of the spread of the virus. That's when my colleague Joonas Nissinen had the idea of mapping the spread of Corona like symptoms through crowdsourced self-reporting.
Within two weeks, a small team of developers data scientists and me as the designer developed an online service which enabled people to insert their symptoms and location through a form. Together with a team of data journalists from the Finish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat we published the questionnaire and analysed the incoming results.
In the weeks following the release of the online survey, most major Finish newsmedia included the survey as an embed in their COVID-19 related news stories.
As a result, the service reached over 170,000 people. After receiving sufficient answers, we added various visualisation to the service to depict the current situation for different parts of the country.
