SAFEapp

Inspiration

Currently there are 12300 persons in institutionalized quarantine and over 10200 people are hospitalized in Romania.

Imagine 336 hours in the life of a COVID-19 suspect, quarantined alone, isolated away from his family, without human interaction and who is constantly measuring every change in his body condition, fearing C-positive.

Imagine >336 hours in the life of a sick person who is lucky enough to not be in the Anesthesia Intensive Care Unit but who is isolated from doctors, family and who is afraid for his own life and needs to communicate more with doctors, a psychologist, state institutions or other people in order to distract himself from his own fears and thoughts.

And now imagine how easy it is to have a mental crisis while in quarantine or in the hospital and at the same time to not have anyone around with sufficient time to see you, hear you, calm you or help you.

SAFEapp is created from these real needs of patients/suspects.

What it does

SAFEapp connects patients/suspects with those who are separated from them by the disease: doctors, psychologists, juridical counselors, state institutions (City Hall, Police, Emergency Situations Department), other hospitalized or quarantined people, all in a MultiChat, full of warmth and color through entertainment options (games, videos, movies, e-books) to increase their well-being, immunity and faster healing. And because our goal is health, we also have a package of options for healthy people: free medical, psychological and legal consultations, e-market offers, COVID hospitals map, positive information, news about NGOs and a space where to attach his contribution to the COVID reality.

The key element of our solution is the construction of the patient's mental map, so that a virtual psychologist (AI) can estimate in advance the appearance of crisis states of the patient or of the COVID suspect.

How I built it

Initially it all started with a quick, simple and targeted solution for patients, suspects and their families (www.caz-covid.ro).

Challenges I ran into

In a short period of time the website proved to be too unattractive and too targeted on a single link in a vast system, which determined us to use other channels to reach the targeted group: Facebook, Instagram, press, epidemic communities, etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The time was too brief and people’s panic was too big to concentrate on other things than the 4000 online consultations and 100 psychological and juridical counselling sessions, lists with material support, applications for financing from a variety of sources.

What I learned

We understood and we haven’t forgotten that we could do it differently, better, more complex, fresher and more positive. That’s why we increased the team with people of various ages (teenagers, bachelors, young people) with different educational backgrounds: IT, arts, psychology, mathematics and computer science. We also introduced the function of virtual psychologist for crisis estimation.

What's next for SAFEapp

So, SAFEapp is the improved version, adapted to both the needs of state institutions to communicate and answer promptly and positively to patients/suspects and also to the needs of patients/suspects to feel safe for themselves and their families. SAFEapp has the governmental version that we will deliver to hospitals, quarantine centers, City Halls, Police and the Emergency Situations Department, as well as the community version for healthy citizens.

We know that this kind of application, inspired by the COVID reality, can be adapted to any other disease/infectious disease or in case of a future different regional epidemic, so we aim to easily adapt it to wider causes and to the requirements of several European states and beyond.

The benefits of implementing the application on a large scale are:

•Public administrations interact more efficiently and promptly with people most affected by the epidemic (patients, suspects and their families).

•The existence of such a vast simultaneous interaction can interconnect not only patients in a transnational network, but also doctors.

•Anticipating the occurrence of psychological crisis situations of patients and suspects.

•Creating a positive environment and framework for patients/suspects.

•Providing a wider range of interactions than family members and virtual network (in which they do not want to expose themselves).

Development: 12 months