Looking for apps and solutions already deployed, we collected all around names, nicknames, nameish, legends, from countries and companies. This is the situation, up to today, April the 10th 2020, roughly:

- The most, was commercial or political advertising for solutions to come (hopefully, but not yet available). Pure, unusable, noise;

- Another part, was about hyped apps, never deployed or in “less than MVP” status. One for all, as it is representative of the category, the Italian AllertaLOM, which is nothing more than a reference app already in use, with an additional survey for self diagnosis. The survey is anonymous and it missed a final call to action for the user… so we still guess what it could be used for. They even launched, missing the sync between campaigns, iOS and Android stores. Nice try, but we have no higher or further expectation about local organisations, naturally due to their focus and role;

- The few remaining, seem to really produce some impact: finally, what looks like something from real world experience. These are:

China: quarantine enforced by an overwhelming network of movement-recognition cameras, also tipping the police everywhere in the cities. Privacy could be respected while, obviously, it is not granted by the technology itself. We also read that facial-recognition would be applied on top: while we cannot exclude this, it is not really required for quarantine enforcing purpose;

South Korea: a GPS based geo tracking app for smartphones, with additional log and a self-diagnosis survey form. Its name is “Covid 100m”, eventually it prompts the user to phone call the medical authorities, and we don’t know if the log is saved into the device itself, or uploaded to an administration’s server. As far as we know of South Korean culture, this wouldn’t make so much of a difference. They also published open data feeds, mashed up in apps like these: Coronamap, Coronaita (search engine);

Singapore, a contacts tracing app, based on Bluetooth: tracing who you have been close to, is supposed to be different from logging your location. They only get the exact info about who you could have infected, nothing else. And it works perfectly either outdoors or indoor. Among all the logged contacts, it even allows to rank the probability of a contagion. The app’s name is “Trace Together”; late in March 2020, its developers also forked the protocol from their project, named it “Blue Trace”, and published it on Github with the name “Open Trace”;

Germany (mostly), contacts tracing, maybe an app: PEPP-PT is an honorable mention, despite it currently (March 2020) aggregates european nations on a declaration of intents, much more than showing working software. This manifesto focuses on preserving privacy and using Bluetooth in smartphones. However, they demonstrated a suitable organizational approach to the highly unpredictable situation. The absence of any other group demonstrating the same ability, made us believe it will easily reach a critical-mass among European governments. Or at least, it will become the place where to discuss and decide the future of internationally adopted outbreak-related information technology.

While the situation in the three asian countries is now reverting to a general lockdown, all their approaches had an impact, at least, in slowing-down the outbreak.

Which is still relevant.

We tried to get in touch to gather more info, to share our thoughts and the idea we came with to put it at work.

Therefore:

We applied to the a government “fast-call” (a grid to describe our solution)
We wrote to the PEPP-PT consortium to offer our help and get info (if any)
We asked some questions to the Bluetrace group (queued in a Zendesk)