Hazzmat | Devpost

Inspiration

People aren’t sure if they must isolate themselves now or if they need to get tested because the virus has the incubation period of 1 - 2 weeks without any symptoms. This black-out period causes two major problems for the community;

The ignorance driven by no symptom can accelerate the speed of the community infection. (People are still traveling a lot, like those Florida spring breakers.) It also caused shelter in place order, which bears non-trivial economic costs and increases people’s anxiety level. We need to lock down communities in a smart way.
Large number of people wanting to test is creating a big burden for the medical system, which should be utilized for testing people with higher probability even without the symptoms.

What it does

It computes the probability of getting infected, based on the users' location data and social network graph in the last 14 days.

How we built it

We built the concept as a web app.

Challenges I ran into

Policy: We planned to make this as an app, but both iOS and Android bans any apps related to COVID-19. [Solution] We decided to build this as an web app.
Location data: Accuracy of GPS for both iOS and Android wasn't as high as we hoped. (iOS: Accuracy to within 10 meters can be expected as long as the phone locks on to at least three satellites. Android: A typical accuracy for a hand-held GPS device would be something like 30% of your measurements within 50 meters of the true position.) [Solution] We are using both location data and social graph to make the prediction better. The hypothesis is that the magnitude of interaction (e.g. closely hanging out with people who may have encountered other sick people) is a stronger signal than just a location (e.g. being in the same store with a person tested positive)
Privacy: Government is talking with big companies for possibly sharing people's data, but it may face a huge privacy issue. Private Kit, similar product developed by MIT, hides PII data but still reveals the location data (e.g. There are 2 confirmed cases on the map pointing my neighborhood, and now I can indirectly tell who they are.) [Solution] Hazzmat hides all PII and location data, and speaks in a sentence only.

Why we think Hazzmat is cool

Many other self-check solutions have two fundamental challenges;

They rely on only the location data that is not accurate enough to give people a clear signal, and
Getting people tested positive or medical authorities to provide data is a huge hurdle, and
Focusing on both true positive (infected) and true negative (not infected) makes the system inefficient

On the other hand, Hazzmat;

Uses both location data and friends network to provide people with more ample and helpful information, and
Gathers not just the confirmed cases, but also people with symptoms in order to quickly cover wider spectrum of users, and
Focuses only on true positive, helping people quickly find higher probability cases and immediately change their actions. (e.g. Self-quarantine)