Seeing his parents struggle, this IT engineer developed an app to help people find COVID-19 vaccination slots
Limnesh Augustine decided to develop an app that helps in finding slots for COVID-19 vaccinations when he saw his parents struggle to find one.
Limnesh Augustine saw his parents struggle to find slots on the CoWIN app and realised the need for an app that makes the process easier and efficient.
A young IT engineer from Kerala developed an app that helps people to find COVID-19 vaccination slots. “CowinSearchHelper,” a Windows desktop application, is aimed at helping those who are struggling to find the available slots by making the process much easier.
“It was really tough for my parents to get appointments for their second dose vaccination. Since they are old and not used to these booking systems, it was very difficult for them to search for the appointments. My wife Jincy Babu and I tried to help them out in getting the appointments but, unfortunately, whenever we searched on the website, there were no slots available,” Limnesh told TNIE.
“There were too many limitations on the portal and our specific request for the second dose of Covishield for the 45-plus parents near our location was not possible. Instead, we had to search for general options and then go through each one to check if there was a slot of second dose available. There was also a limit of 20 maximum searches and the slot would be cached. It would be refreshed only every five minutes. By the time we found a slot, it might be already booked and closed,” he explained.
Image: TNIE
The government had published two sets of APIs, allowing applications to talk to each other.
"The public APIs will enable us to query with detailed parameters and there were no session limits and the query was dynamic and real-time. So, the moment the slot is uploaded in the system by any hospital or vaccination centre, it can be queried through the API. I then developed the application in Dotnet/C# on June 10 to use these APIs for vaccination slot search," he told India Times.
The application he developed alerts people via SMS when a slot is available in a centre within a 5 km radius from their houses.
The app not only helped Limnesh get an appointment for his parents but also enabled many people to find the available slots and get vaccinated.
Edited by Kanishk Singh
