COVID Active Response Centre

After the Coronavirus began to spread rapidly through the country and country “lock down” quarantine was established, we began to monitor the impact on the economy and life of people in general and decided to do something about it. We formed a civic initiative “COVID19CZ”, where we joined tens of IT companies and hundreds of IT volunteers to build a smart quarantine solution. The goal was to start tracing the spread of virus - check the hotspots of infection, trace the risky contacts and get them quickly to tests and individual quarantine, thus reducing the country lock down and let the economy breath again. We built a wide end-to-end solution called “smart quarantine” involving using location data from mobile phones, from phone apps, bluetooth app and banking location data.

Our main weapon is and always will be the work with location data and their visualization. For the district sanitary stations, we developed and launched the smart tracing of the Coronavirus spread with the help of location data from phones and banks. Thanks to the advanced data analysis, we, with the agreement of the infected person, are creating a memory map that transparently shows where and for how long the infected person moved around in the past 3 weeks. Sanitary workers are thus no longer reliant on the memory of the infected and focus on critical moments and places where the virus could have spread onto other people. This way they can warn all the people that could have come in contact with the virus and will order the so-called smart quarantine (pointed quarantine). This could replace the global measures that have paralyzed the everyone in the country. Also the solution can be used more universally however. Not just tracing the virus spread but also highly valuable for general disaster recovery situations.

We built a wide end-to-end solution called “smart quarantine” involving using location data from mobile phones, from phone apps, bluetooth app and banking location data. The reason for so many touch points of tracing is simple - neither of these “channels” work sufficiently on their own (penetration of apps, mobile phones, bank cards, etc..) The solution enabled to have the spread of the virus under control and reduce country lock down sooner.

Our solution starts with positively tested people. We need to help them remember where they were (what places) and whom they met. This is impossible without historical location data. Then the important places of infection spread are identified throughout the call and they are stored in the application (such as visit of vet doctor, waiting with 20 other people in waiting room in close proximity, etc..). These hotspots are then used for follow up calls (call to the vet and seeing if there is a book of visits) and the location is tested against telco data, banking transactions or mobile apps to check if we identify any of these contacts who are in a high risk of being infected.

Our solution serves both state and citizens because the virus spreads through countries without any exception. Nationwide quarantine has an impact on the social lives of people who are cut off from contacts, on children who do not go to school, and on the job site due to closed or limited open businesses. Thanks to clever quarantine, all of this could be eliminated.

However the main user of the solution is Ministry of Health and the CDCs.

We believe our solution solves one of the most critical problems related to spreading of the Covid19 virus. We help tame the pace of infection spread due to timely and accurate reaction. The solution is universally applicable to other virus and disease situations. The solution is easily replicable anywhere in the world (we did project clones for Slovakia and Netherlands in just 2 day time). The solution enables countries to have the spread of the virus under the control and apply only targeted individual quarantines, not a country lock down quarantine.

Combination of data sources, security and scalability. The solution uses data from mobile apps and operators about phone movement and banks about credit card transactions. We are able to simply add another sources. The system requires explicit consent of the patient to use his/her personal data. thanks to it the solution was smoothly accepted by public and we already tested it in real life.

Call center is highly distributed. New operators can work even from home and with regular computer. We know from experience the system is so easy to use the group of new operators can be fully trained within one day. 

The solution is based on 5 modulary integrated technologies.

ISIN - Provides data about positively tested patients in Czech republic

Daktela - Distributed and scalable call center. Allows to gain new information and explicit consent from the patient. 

Keboola - Processes data from sources. Allows to easily plug new data source.

Data sources systems - Provides data about user movement and his close contacts. (mobile apps, banks systems, mobile operator systems, ...)

CleverMaps - Visualize and filters the data. Generates a Memory map which allows operators to easily see the critical places of occurence of infected people.

Each component can be replaced.

The solution is used several months in Czechia and was tested in Slovakia and Netherlands. In Czechia it was widely accepted both by public and hygiene center operators. Thousands of positive patients was called by hundreds of hygiene center operators. We constantly accept feedback and improve the solution. 

Improve & support & expands Smart quarantine solution => More sanitary workers is able to easily localize movement of positive patient and get his close contacts => Put in quarantine only infected people and their close contacts => Control of infection without need of nation-wide lockdown => Health while Economically prosperous society

The solution is currently used by 321 sanitary workers who has traced so far thousands of the infected people in Czech Republic. We have proved the potential of Memory map solution and we believe that it has potential to to be used worldwide. There's no limit of users from any country that can be served, the platform itself is scalable.

To develop a modular cloud platform for the effective management of situations such as pandemics or natural disasters with multidimensional data model design, a comprehensive data security solution, tools to ensure the trustworthiness of data as well as a multidimensional matrix for handling personal data in accordance with relevant legislation. The concept of the solution itself is unique. No less innovative will be its deployment anywhere in the world in an extremely short time, its ability to be embedded in third-party systems, and connected to heterogeneous data sources. The impetus for the project idea was the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated activities around the application called “Smart quarantine”.

These technical improvements will enhance the solution that has huge impact on society, health and economy in pandemic conditions. The goals it to spread the solution worldwide.

We will need financial support to deliver technical goals mentioned in previous questions and get it to the foreign markets. The technical goals will improve the safety and deployment options of Memory maps and use of sensitive data. There are also legislative issues in different areas on how to handle sensitive personal information that has to be reflected in the solution. The solution is being used in Czech Republic and we see that even there has to be consent with use of sensitive data and data are available to sanitary workers only for limited time people are afraid that the data could be misused.

We plan to more cooperate with technical universities and its students on innovative solutions. We plan to financially support team of technicians and marketers to improve security and scalability of the solution and expands it to more countries to have bigger impact on society. We plan to use part of resources to scale and operate our cloud infrastructure to be able to handle massive amount of new users.

A total of 6 people are working on the project (all part-time).

We are highly motivated specialists in geospatial analysis with technical background.

Ondřej Tomas - Project sponsor and evangelist - Ondřej founded and managed the CRM program and data warehouse in Česká pojišťovna, managed business consultants for CRM and BI in Oracle, managed the Czech branch of global research agency GfK. Founder of CleverMaps

Lukáš Puchrik - Product Manager - Geo-information expert with long term experience from Geodis and BLOM. He has managed large-scale projects both in the Czech Republic and internationally.

Jiří Žaloudek - SW Architect - Jiří managed the SW Development at GoodData. He contributed to the development of the GoodData platform - a vision quest, managing development teams and managing cloud solutions administration for Enterprise customers.

Jan Kantor - Data Analyst - Jan is responsible for project implementation and has a unique knowledge combining cartography and informatics. 

Barbora, Ondřej - support

Keboola - ETL and data orchestration provider

Daktela - contact center is a cloud-based solution of call center with native support for many communication channels "OmniChannel" in one Web application - phone, email, helpdesk, Webchat, SMS and social networks

We provide our Location analytics platform in a SAAS mode. That means monthly subscription payments depending on number of users, data volumes and intensity of usage.

The platform can be used in a direct or OEM mode.

Services are covered separately per manday basis. 

The benefit of this approach is that customers can scale up and down with the usage of the solution. i.e. in the times with no pandemics you pay just the very basic maintenance fee and you start paying only when the load starts on.

The system runs exclusively from cloud and thus is operated centrally and online. We tend to cooperate with partners in the countries where it is needed due to restrictions or specific legislation.

Our plan is to reach financial break even during 2021. We built the first version of Active response center for free as a volunteer work. We will now need it to commercialize it and pay back the costs.