A team from Philippine Science High School – Central Visayas Campus (PSHS-CVisC) has created a mobile application that can 
help health workers monitor fast the condition of people possibly infected with COVID-19.
The app COVID Control was developed by Marybeth Flonia Sato, a grade 12 scholar; Sean Dominic Abella, a PSHS-CVisC alumnus; and Felix Calvo, a PSHS-CVisC Computer Science teacher. With COVID Control, medical frontliners can easily keep track of the health condition of individuals who have been classified as either person under monitoring (PUM) or person under investigation (PUI).
PUM and PUI
PUM refers to an individual who was exposed to a COVID-19 patient or who visited a place with positive cases yet remains asymptomatic. On the other hand, PUI refers to one who manifests symptoms of the disease such as fever, cough, and sore throat and who has a travel history to places with cases of COVID-19 infection.
How does the COVID Control work?
The app provides blank fields to be filled out by the health worker with information about the person being monitored such as body temperature and presence of symptoms. COVID Control promises fast, paperless monitoring, and the data encoded into it can be easily updated every day. Also, there is an option that allows medical workers to list down the names of people whom the PUIs or PUMs had contact with and to trace the places where they had been to in the past 14 days. The app will collate all the information, and a report will then be emailed to authorized health officials.
Who can use the app?
The right to use COVID Control is exclusively given to medical frontliners who have permission from their immediate supervisors or superiors. Workers are only granted access to information of patients who reside in their municipality or city. The app ensures that the rules and regulations of the Data Privacy Act are complied with.
To date, COVID Control has supported more than 4,000 barangays throughout Central Visayas. The developers have been reaching out to other municipalities and cities in the region to help speed up the process of monitoring patients by means of the app.
“We need to help our frontliners as best we can. There is not much we can do from the safety of our own homes, but we thought that maybe we can use our skill in software development to do something about it,” Sato said.
As of now, the COVID Control app can be downloaded only for Android devices from Google Play Store. It will be made available to IOS devices soon.
