The CoFlex repository
The problem your project solves The solution you bring to the table What you have done during the weekend The solution’s impact to the crisis The necessities in order to continue the project The value of your solution(s) after the crisis The URL to the prototype [Github, Website,...]
Inspiration :
How are you doing during the Coronavirus lockdown ? If you live in a city, you go jogging once a day among roads crowded by people who had the same idea and you can’t go very far. Same story everyday. If you live in a peaceful countryside, you look out the window all day long, willing to go out and walk in the nature. But you are strongly honest person, you do not want to break the law. Still, you say to yourself that it is unfair : you see no one, there is no reason that you couldn’t go out !
What it does :
CoFlex is a solution to get more visibility on how to avoid areas with high contagion risk, and makes it possible to go to uncrowded ones anytime you want ! We offer the displaying of a map with day-ahead prediction of contagion risk by combining real-time people density, virus incidence and state-of-the-art epidemiologic models. CoFlex also handles your health conditions by giving recommendations on which protective equipments to wear.
CoFlex also helps the government to monitor the end of lockdown smartly : the application offers a system of dynamic attestation delivering. For areas predicted day-ahead as low contagion areas, users can download an attestation that allows them to go there, conditioned on having the equipment recommended by the app. Policeman can control that people are legitimate to be in an area via a QR code given on the attestation. If too many people download the attestation for the same area, the application stops providing it, to keep the dangerosity of areas low enough.
What we did this week-end :
During this week-end, we first thought about the design of the application, which is now ready and it only left to code the user interface. Concerning the backend and the algorithms of prediction of contagion risk, we built a predictive model based on epidemiologic models found in recent scientific literature and crowd movements. The overall architecture of the code has been designed by our data scientists.
We also got in touch with a potential partners, namely Orange, which would provide us the data concerning the density of population and could help financing the project. We looked into possibilities of making contracts with the government to ensure the viability of the attestation system.
Solution impact’s on crisis : We provide concerned citizens, governments and municipalities a secure and flexible way to initiate the end of lockdown. It would help avoid new propagation of the virus, with an homogenisation of the population density and contagion risk. We wish to provide additional exit authorizations to citizens based on the danger of their itinerary, the quality of their protection and their personal risks. The impact of the solution on the crisis is clear : it would considerably raise the number of opportunities to re start our economy, as it would allow more exits in a secure way. CoFlex also makes predictions on where people are going, and hence can help authorities to have a better overview on where to deploy preventive measures.
Necessities in order to continue the project :
Being able to develop CoFlexas rapidly as possible is crucial, as the economic and social consequences require that an end of lockdown be put in place within the next month. The app would require to be coded fastly (a couple of weeks). Continuing this project would lead to get ones hands in the hard stuff : coding. First, we would need to code the user interface of the app. Second, we would have to get all the real-time data concerning population density via GPS tracking given by our partner Orange. To create the map, we would use Google Maps APIs to get data of delimitations of administrative regions. We would also need to get the data of virus incidence, which is freely available on the Internet, so this would result in building pipelines from the Internet to the backend of the app. Finally, the model of areas contagion risk would have to be implemented.
This would lead into hiring 6 developers, and buying or borrow servers to make our app working.
Value of the solution after the crisis :
After the crisis, our solution would mainly help people who care about their health to feel more secure. It is likely that the people more at risk would want to ensure of the safety of their exits long after the end of lockdown. Furthermore, we have seen in the past 20 years the multiplication of local epidemics such as H1N1, Ebola, dengue fever… The scientific consensus is that those epidemics are going to occur even more frequently. The long term project is that CoFlex helps preventing the propagation of any new epidemic that may occur.