A variety of new tools are being built to help businesses reopen as safely as possible and to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. These include personal symptom trackers, local exposure notification tools, and platforms for limiting occupancy of facilities to allow for physical distancing.
The COVID Tech Task Force along with our partners, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, TechCrunch, Betaworks Studios and Hangar, hosted a conference on June 17th to discuss contact tracing, exposure notification, and tools that businesses could use to reopen safely.
In advance of the conference, we gathered the below demos from teams building relevant products, as we’ve done previously regarding contact tracing for TechCrunch. Our goal is to provide public health officials, business leaders, and state and local government, with information on some of the tools that could be available to them as they consider reopening. We do not necessarily endorse any of these products and understand that there may be material concerns, including regarding their security and privacy. The descriptions of the products below have been provided by the companies.
Product Demos
Aruba is the Intelligent Edge business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It’s the leading provider of secure, AI-powered networking — including wired, wireless, and network security solutions — that enable customers to deliver digital experiences in the era of data analytics driven by IoT, AI and automation.
2. WorkSafe
Pointr is a global leader in indoor location. They work with large organizations across the US such as Honeywell, KPMG and the Department of Homeland Security to enable location-based services inside buildings. They are now using their Bluetooth expertise to launch WorkSafe, a contact tracing app and dashboard to help companies reopen buildings.
3. CV Key
CVKey Project is on a mission to help communities reopen responsibly during the COVID-19 pandemic without compromising privacy. The CVKey app connects you with your local health officials to get the latest health and access guidance, so you know what kinds of places are open and what to expect when you visit them with simple policy descriptions. For places with access restrictions, generate a CVPass to get in quickly without sharing your personal health data.
4. Estimote
Estimote provides a “Proof of Health” wearable platform for worker safety and contact tracing — they help companies monitor the potential spread of COVID-19 from person-to-person — at the level of a workplace. They are in production and are helping many companies maintain a pulse on transmission among their workforce, and providing them with the ability to trace back local spread before it becomes an outsized risk.
Created in partnership between Nodle.io, Coalition Network, and Avnet, the Nodle M1 is a 2 inch, industrial-grade smart wearable contact device that buzzes employees when they get within 6 feet of each other. Using cutting edge, privacy-first technology, it securely records the time and duration of interactions between employees with high accuracy, anonymity, and far better precision than any other smartphone-based solution. If a worker has tested positive, those who were in contact can be immediately notified by the operations or HR department to accelerate isolation measures. The device leverages parts of the open source Whisper Tracing Protocol and with employee and employer opt-in, the Nodle M1 system becomes interoperable with the Coalition App and its ecosystem.
Healthy Together is an end-to-end COVID-19 response platform that is fully integrated into public health and enterprise. Launched in April for the State of Utah, Healthy Together’s mobile applications support self-assessment, COVID-19 testing access and results, and augmented contact tracing, as well as enterprise contact tracing, workflow tools, data integrations and visualizations. Leveraging existing technology that has scaled to millions of users and informed by public health experts, Healthy Together will soon be announcing additional states and enterprise customers that are using the platform to protect the health of residents and employees.
7. How We Feel
How We Feel lets you self-report your age, sex, ZIP code and any health symptoms you experience. The app was built by an independent, nonprofit organization called The How We Feel Project. Their tech team includes Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest, and a volunteer group of current and former Pinterest employees. They are working with scientists, doctors and public health professionals from leading institutions including, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
8. Dasha.ai
Dasha is an API-first company. Their main product is Dasha platform for developers that mimics how people communicate in real life and makes for an incredibly convincing experience. It allows you to design, test and launch rich, human-level voice conversations. Virtually any business process that is being accomplished over the phone (or simply with voice) — can be automated using Dasha.AI platform on a human-level (people talking to Dasha.AI won’t notice the difference between AI and a real human).
9. Check-In
Check-In is a PWC platform made up of two products and built with your people’s privacy in mind. The first is Status Connect, which keeps you connected to your people, empowering them to quickly report changing work conditions and verify their health status, so you can identify potential risks.
The second is Automatic Contact Tracing, which helps employers aid their people in feeling safer by identifying employees’ risk of exposure, so leaders can quickly communicate potential exposure to their workforce.
10. MyImmunityPass
ARVR Academy was established to design, develop, and address hard problems in the world of AI/ML, Big Data, Cyber Security, and Augmented/Virtual Reality. Their team of expertise have extensive knowledge in their industries, they operate under separate entities with one goal in mind ‘Addressing tough problems Businesses face today’. They developed ‘My Immunity Pass’ platform to help communities and Businesses open safely, the platform is very easy to adopt, and it automate the existing non-effective/scalable system.
Gimbal is a Qualcomm spinoff from 2011 with proximity software inside apps such as Citibank, Marriott, Panera Bread, Sephora, and 2,500 others. It has built an app called YouHealth that has Memory Logging to assist case workers in interviewing COVID patients faster, and it can leverage Apple & Google’s API for Exposure Notifications. This app uses Bluetooth for contact tracing, and does not use GPS location data in any way.
12. Work | Space
Work | Space is a free physical distancing app using Bluetooth for Android and iOS built for the Enterprise by Equal Experts. Equal Experts is a global network of over 1700 experienced technology professionals, with teams to help customers disrupt their markets, create innovative products, accelerate delivery, and build world-class solutions.
13. Greeter.ai
Greeter provides instantly deployable and cost-effective pre-screening, entrance screening, and Covid 19 safety protocol compliance (PPE, distancing, etc.) solution. The solution is already showing success at hospitals (50% productivity gains), nuclear plants and mining (50% reduction in PPE non-compliance).
14. NeuStar
Neustar enables more effective contact tracing efforts by correcting mistakes and gaps in contact data, and also providing contact tracers the phone behavior intelligence needed to reach the right person at the right time. This improves the effectiveness of outreach efforts to potentially infected persons by an average of 33%, further decreasing infection rates and saving lives. If you want further information, reach out to [email protected].
15. Crowdless
Crowdless is designed by lanterne.ai. They are an award-winning social enterprise who specialise in crisis technology. Our mission is to use data to improve safety and promote economic development. Lanterne has received funding and support from: the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centre UK, the European Union’s Big Data Corridor Program, the University of Oxford’s Oxford Foundry, London School of Economics (LSE) Generate, Santander Universities and Yoti.
16. Identigy
Identigy has a fully developed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering with central offices based in Dubai and a distributed workforce that spans the globe. Since 2014, Identigy has been an industry leader in the development and deployment of journey management solutions. Universities, employers, and smart cities are currently utilizing the JRNY platform to seamlessly integrate technology into their stakeholders’ experience. The JRNY platform manages who, what, where, when, and how for all activities available to deliver a seamless user experience driven by identity, from before the journey begins until after they leave, and all steps in between.