YRisk: A Novel Pandemic Risk Management Solution

“A personalised pandemic risk management solution to enable balanced localised risk assessments of infection to protect lives and livelihoods.” 

Dr Chris Cormack – Team Lead 

Dr Sankalp Chaturvedi – Research Team Principal Investigator 

Dr Marisa Miraldo - Health Economist

Dr David Haw - Epidemiologist Modeller

Pandemics like COVID-19 have highlighted how challenging it is for countries to manage the risks of infection, and timely research has helped considerably. Globally, there are over 135 million people infected, and some countries have performed better than the others on controlling number of the infections/deaths, but economically every country has suffered. Even when data was available, policy makers managing risks by introducing social control interventions has resulted in adverse impacts to livelihoods or non-optimal behavioural compliance. Furthermore, many countries have struggled in achieving individual compliance. The longevity of the pandemic has been tedious because it has been hard for policymakers to balance health and economic trade-offs. Without the wider availability of decision-making support tools and great specificity, it has been difficult to achieve this balance. 

Using specific, measurable goals, individuals can self-regulate their risk profile. The YRisk tool uses these personalized factors to give robust risk assessments. This can be further enhanced by including additional circumstantial factors including vaccination rates and social distancing requirements which can help individuals to determine the safety of their workplace and other environments. This will help to identify and respond to local outbreaks/variants so individuals can apply mitigation behaviours to reduce risk. 

The key beneficiaries of our solution are users, businesses, and policy makers.  

YRisk technology is a solution designed to enable all individuals to make informed decisions in controlling risk of infection and proactively engaging in protective health behaviours. The technology is suited to policy makers, who may be able to collect frequent dynamic data on risks and behaviours to develop targeted interventions. The app will be made available globally, enabling evidence gathering in densely populated countries (including low- and middle-income countries) as a low cost and data driven risk management tool. Future versions will integrate alternative data on mobility and other modes of data collection to assess infections and engagement with vaccination. Triangulating the data across different countries can better inform coordinated international initiatives on pandemic preparedness. Embedding data on protective behaviours such as vaccination/masks will enable the design of personalized interventions to counteract vaccine/masks hesitancy. Through field trials of the app, we will engage users to understand behavioural interventions and promote social protection and vaccination uptake. Combined with the model of economic activity and behaviour data we provide a means of balancing economic and healthcare activities, with the need to manage pressures on healthcare. 

The YRisk project is designed to provide users and establishments with the ability to directly assess their risks and enable a direct means to manage this risk on personalized basis, thus enabling end users to make informed decisions. This ability to estimate and control risk provides a means to allow a further diversification of activity, enabling more balanced and sustained economic and social activity for each user. 

The solution identifies those that are at most risk, e.g. key workers or those in higher density locations, and allows opportunities for states to provide mitigation solutions such as testing via risk based assessments in the app and/or risk-based vaccination strategies, to help reduce the risks for all. YRisk will be able to identify the risk factors for each person and advise based on the information provided. In later stages of a novel pandemic those high-risk users would be able to receive advice to test or vaccinate.  

The YRisk proposal has been designed for all, to have a tangible economic, social and health impact in responding to pandemics. 

It has been built to be deployed on mobile devices with functionality that is now commonly available globally and widely used by billions of people. If some parties do not have this technology, then generic advice on risk can be provided, and data collected. 

YRisk can be customized to meet local needs to manage risks. Firstly, by allowing people to assess and control their daily risks of infection, and in combination to provide policy makers with the knowledge required to permit economic activity in a controlled and measurable way. We have run a rapid survey on the use of such an application with 66% of people expressing a desire to use the app.  

The trials we propose to run will permit a direct test of compliance and deviations, providing the insight we require to quickly refine the policy interventions that will be embedded into the policy model. 

The construction of the policy model will allow the further design and optimisation of different models of behaviour and permit a safe way to test innovative ideas without putting lives at risk.

Whilst the world is still impacted by COVID-19, YRisk allows immediate impact over the next 12 months and beyond, and importantly, the principals of our application can be adapted rapidly once information is available on new diseases. The proposed research and deployment allow a direct release of the application within 12 months. The ongoing research in modelling the impact of the use of the application will continue for the remaining two years. This process has the potential to change the means of non-medical interventions as part of future pandemic policy management. 

The nature of the YRisk solution is such that once information is obtained on the nature and mode of transmission, the framework can be rapidly calibrated and released to help control infection. 

With the current ongoing crisis, it is feasible that there will soon be nations where live trials of this application will be possible. We will work to deploy the solutions where possible to have immediate impact. 

With trials and the application complete it will be possible to deploy a novel solution for YRisk rapidly as a downloadable application and to have the servers ready to deploy. This will be part of the feasibility analysis within the project. 

Within the project we will be running trials whilst there is an ongoing COVID-19 infection and will be looking for users to follow the instructions from a pre-release version of the application. This will be benchmarked against a trial group that report on their status but do not have any intervention from the application. There will be a further group that will not have access to the application but keep a record of activity without any benchmarks provided. This will provide a study set in the locations we study to enable us to assess the effectiveness on behaviours for the application. Our success will be based on an understanding of adherence to the risks based on the level of intervention measures. 

The model behind the Yrisk system has already been externally and favourably benchmarked for real word applications and users have actively used the pilot to help control risk.

Furthermore, we will be developing an agent-based model where the use of different intervention policies is modelled, including the use of this application. A measure of success will be exhibiting how the YRisk project can demonstrate the balance of risks and activity more effectively that current controls. 

The main factor is the cost of research and development to demonstrate the full viability of the policy solution. Also conceptual barriers to enable policy makers to understand the power of the approach put forward, and to engage in acceptance of different models to manage risks relating to the gathering of information on personal levels of risk, and how these policies can be managed. 

In terms of cost, the project costs outlined as part of this bid provide a detailed decomposition of the people and their skills needed to ensure we can further develop the technology, to develop the models to assess the impact of the innovative technology in the absence of actual infection data and analyse the information from the application. This will build on the skills and expertise from the team that has already produced the proof-of-concept model. 

Other challenges that exist might be ethical/legal challenges of adoption. As part of this process, we would build the ethical case for the use of such technology where the needs require. This will be done through the field trials, uses of data, and monitoring will be highlighted, and the model developed and enhanced where there are any issues. See PDF.

Imperial College London, UK

• Sankalp Chaturvedi
• Marisa Miraldo
• David Haw
• Chris Cormack (Honorary Research Fellow)

Quant Foundry Limited, UK

• Chris Cormack

Our solution to manage ongoing and future pandemic risks requires some fundamental research to be performed, and development of proof concept trials. Furthermore, there will be challenges surrounding the effectiveness of the solution for some countries that may not have extensive access to smartphone services, and we will need to test our ideas to address those challenges. 

The challenges related to user privacy from the use of this technology need to be demonstrated to be safe, and the outcomes reliable. To enable wider roll out and impact the data collection and the policy impact model will enable an improved view of the value of such technology as part of a policy. This will provide the transparency and impact necessary to make balanced decisions on the solutions provided, compared to the approaches, and impacts on freedoms that current policy solutions around the world have implemented. 

Funding of this research and demonstration of the feasibility of this work, could pave the way to further value added enagagments from this concept, that could attract further contractural engagements.

We propose to partner with the following organisations: 

Google: Mainly for access to mobility data and services also to help in the optimisation of the application framework communication layers and advice on ways to improve the privacy measures on the application. As Google has a global presence in terms of data collection access and use of trial data sets in various parts of the world, that  would be invaluable. 

Vodafone Foundation for smartphone’s computing power that will enable calculating risk profiles faster as well as optimal personalized recommendations conveyed through the interventions/policies to be bed tested. We will also seek support in disseminating the app and recruiting users.