One track in this year's IBM Call for Code challenge focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, calling on participants to work in three areas: assisting overwhelmed crisis communication systems; improving remote education; and fostering community cooperation.
Three winning proposals were announced on May 5 at IBM's Think Digital event:
An India-based team of researchers from Capgemini unit Altran won for its "Are You Well?" mobile app, designed to help alleviate the strain on overloaded medical systems by providing a link to a patient monitoring dashboard.
A global team based at the University of British Columbia in Canada developed CovidImpact, a tool that helps reduce the financial impact of the pandemic on small businesses by assessing their financial risk levels.
U.S.-based developer David Chura created SafeQueue, a mobile app that uses GPS location data and QR codes to create virtual lines to enable safer entry into business establishments and polling places.