staySafe

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  This is the logo of our app

Inspiration

Our team is utterly composed by Italians. We all soon understood that we wanted to do something for our country, given the disastrous situation created by the COVID-19-led crisis. As soon as we got to discover the challenge, we agreed on creating an assistive app to support governments and citizens in dealing with the crisis. staySafe was soon after born with the aim of containing the spread and impact of COVID-19 by providing a real-time updated risk map of infected individuals.

What it does

staySafe is an application that combines tracking data and health care data in order to provide an accurate picture of people's movements once the lockdowns are over. In particular, we leverage contact tracking to notify each person who has been exposed to the virus while giving them the opportunity to take appropriate actions to protect their families, their friends, and the local community.

How I built it

Technically, the app uses health care data (validated by the health care personnel) which are anonymized through the use of hash cryptography in order to safeguard privacy. Afterwards, these data are then combined with location APIs (mainly Google Maps APIs) and distances as well as interactions among users are then analysed. Finally, our data will be visualized in a map with the aim of highlighting new potential outbreaks.

More specifically, our data is combined by using a variety of statistical algorithms through which we examine distances and flows of tracked IDs at both a local and national scale. Basically, staySafe just provides an updated risk map to the users without collecting their location history: instead of taking their data, we provide them with ours.

Thanks to a push notification system, users who have been exposed to the virus will be notified and thus are provided with the opportunity to take appropriate actions to protect their families, their friends, and the local community.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The first big accomplishment was to figure out a way to achieve our two main focuses, i.e. how to scale the solution while ensuring privacy and data protection. In these regards, we do not collect any personal information in clear but we rather use encrypted data. Our technology allows each person's device to interact with the Google Maps API without 'us' being in the middle; this means that once the person has his/her personal data processed on the device, the app will encrypt the risky locations, send them to our servers and update the “risk” map.

Also, I'm proud of the work that we managed to do in terms of testing the market feasibility of the solution. In fact, we conducted several survey, we sent out our landing page as a smoke test via WhatsApp and analysed the type of response that people had (to check on users' response rates) as well as we run interviews with relevant stakeholders (including representants of the public and private sectors, lawyers, other start-ups and so on).

What I learned

I learnt that team cohesion and diversity are key for the success of a solution. We are all people with very different backgrounds and studies yet we all found ourselves aligned on creating a solution for the people in our country.

As a team, we learnt the value of team building and coordination under pressure. The fact that we are all in lockdown at the moment helped on one hand (we were all available to call and discuss issues at any time) but also added more stress because of connectivity issues or communications getting lost. Overall, it was a great experience and we are all proud of the result that we achieved.

What's next for staySafe

In the next week, staySafe will reach out to experts and professionals from different fields in order to understand how to implement the solution as soon as possible. We would start from Italy, being our home country as well as one of the most affected by the crisis.

We have already secured a number of partnerships with private companies and startups such as Start2Impact, Startup Geeks, which support our project providing access to their resources. Moreover, discussions are already on-going with mayors of cities in Lombardia who are interested in launching the first pilot in the region.