Anti Pandemic

Inspiration

In the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, we believe that fast virus detection followed by prompt and appropriate actions can make a difference and help stop the spread. Our solution will provide a possibility to notify all individuals you have been in close proximity to in the recent period that you are tested positive and likewise, to get notified by them. This can help individuals act in the best possible ways, get tested or stay in isolation while the health care providers can easily trace infected people and provide care in the very early stage of the disease. Fast and accurate detection will slow down and eventually stop the spread of the virus.

What it does

The app will use the available wifi networks (their MAC addresses and signal strength) or in same cases the current passive location of the device to create unique hash keys (location fingerprints) which will be stored locally on the mobile device. The same keys will be created for all other users that are in the same location at the same time. Once someone is tested positive they can just click a notify button and share all their keys with all the peers in the network. If some of the recipients have the same key which means they were in the same location at the same time with the infected user, the match is done and they all will get notified. The keys you store or share are encrypted fingerprints of your recent locations so you will not share any private information about yourself and you also will not be able to identify the person who shared the information with you.

Alternatively, there could be a third centralized authority (i.e local government, local healthcare provider, etc.) that can monitor and approve requests for sharing the status of being tested positive in such a manner it will prevent sharing fake information in the network. This authority can also ask the new positive users after they are officially tested to share their keys and trace all other potential contacts.

Because no active location tracking or active p2p communication is used (like GPS tracking and Bluetooth key-exchange), the app doesn't significantly drain the battery.

How we built it

Native Android application using the standard Android development tools. Data analysis with SQLite (understanding the data and algorithm development) Looking forward to starting the iOS native app soon.

Challenges we ran into

Quite a lot :) We first thought about implementing a solution that will utilize only the available wifi networks (MAC + signal strength) to create a unique “fingerprint” of the location and generate hash keys to work with. After some research and hands-on experience we found out that Android API provides access to the required data but after version 9.0 it does not allow frequent checks for the background processes. For the Apple devices, it is even more challenging as the iOS API does not provide any access publicly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to generate a lot of ideas on how to approach the challenges with getting the location and most importantly sharing the data in encrypted and secure ways.