Development of BITIM Quiz Android Application: A Panacea for Minimizing the Spread of Covid-19

Abstract

The outbreak of Coronavirus (Covid-19) was declared worldwide by the World Health Organization (WHO) as pandemic. With its increase of affected cases worldwide, lockdown and even the protocol guidelines given to be followed by people, the transmission can only be restricted in small community or society. When considering a country of relatively large population like Nigeria, it is such a herculean task to control or minimize the spread despite various restrictions put in place by Nigeria Centre for Diseases Control (NCDC). This paper mainly focuses on development of an Android application for training and creating awareness regarding Covid-19 by providing the latest information about the spread of the virus. This Android application (BITIM) updates people through the game platform that has multiples quiz games for the users to select option that is most preferred. This application can be used as a tool for creating further social awareness which can be deployed on health facilities across the nation for employee involved in essential, non-essential duties and general public about the arising need of precautionary measures to be taken by the people. By analyzing the results downloaded from Cloud Firestore using a Microsoft Excel, it was observed that 95% of people who played the quiz game became more informed about the challenges of public health emergencies and enhanced their readiness to fight the epidemics through prevention, detection and control method. The results indicates that BITIM application serves as a dynamic tool that inspires users to develop skills as they focus on the quiz activities of the game. Hence, this study found that the level of adoption and acceptance of this technology is very high because it supports the directives from Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) which was used as an assessment tool and not for diagnostic purposes to minimize the spread of Covid-19 across the country. However, all these functionalities were achieved and developed using JAVA, REACT Native and XML for the frontend activities, while Cloud Firebase and JSON were used in programming the backend.