Madeira COVID-19 platform

A team of researchers from the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI/LARSyS), a research unit of the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) partially managed by ARDITI – Regional Agency for the Development of Research, Technology, and Innovation, led by Prof. Nuno Nunes, Full Professor at IST and President of ITI, collaborated in the development of a public information visualization platform for COVID-19 in the Autonomous Region of Madeira (RAM). The disclosure of information related to the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus requires the application of responsible techniques that allow the sharing of credible and contextualized information to the population, in particular because we are facing an exponential growth phenomenon that can be misinterpreted.

The ITI/LARSyS team, which has the technical development of researchers Miguel Ribeiro (encoding) and Marta Ferreira (design), worked together with technicians from the Regional Secretary of Health and the Civil Protection to adapt the information to the needs and geography of the RAM.

This work also involved the development of a decision support system that integrates models for predicting the mobility of local and foreign citizens, made available by NOS, and also risk models that are being developed by teams from the Faculty of Sciences and Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon.

The project is expected to continue to support not only during the mitigation phase of COVID-19 but also when going back to normal after the peak of the epidemic is over.

The expectation is that the information provided by the research teams will allow not only health and safety authorities to make informed decisions, in a context of great uncertainty and very rapid evolution, but also to keep the population informed and aware that behavior change is the biggest weapon to overcome this period.

The platform can be accessed via the link https://covidmadeira.pt/dashboard/.

In the media

Published in Funchal Notícias, on April 17, 2020:  https://funchalnoticias.net/2020/04/17/instituto-de-tecnologias-interativas-da-madeira-colabora-na-criacao-de-plataforma-de-visualizacao-publica-da-covid-19/.

Published in RTP Madeira, on April 17, 2020: https://www.rtp.pt/madeira/sociedade/madeira-tem-plataforma-que-acompanha-a-evolucao-da-covid-19-audio_37556.