Circles.Health

Circles.Health allows people to create support networks during the pandemic while stopping the virus transmission in a distributed and private way.

Marcelo Michelsohn

Covid-19 harms global health incommensurably. Stopping contagion is crucial, but challenging: around 50% of the contagion is caused by asymptomatic infected people.

Social isolation slows down the spread but increases susceptibility to mental health disorders: depression rose from 8.5% to 28% on American adults, and 1 in every 3 recovered Covid-19 patients suffer from mental health issues.

David Napier states that "those who engage and exchange socially (...) are better equipped to deal with the uncertainty of COVID-19". But it is exactly when meeting close relatives and friends that people tend to unmask and stay indoors for longer - good for mental health, but bad for the spread.

What if we could "kill two evils with one stone", interacting with loved ones while protecting everyone from getting infected and spreading the virus?

Circles allows people to track their real network up to 3 degrees of separation going beyond the 5 people they actually meet, informing and asking everyone whether they have any symptoms. The whole network receives an alert and can self-isolate, creating "pocket-lockdowns" only where it really matters. Social relations can still happen, the economy is kept running, and the virus spread is cut on the micro-level.

Our target audience are people like us: concerned with the pandemic, in need of face-to-face contact with loved ones, but unwilling to put ourselves and others at risk.

We would like to protect ourselves and others but feel the need to meet other people. However, we risk (and fear) infecting or getting infected by Covid-19. While we ask our friends and family about their health, it is not feasible to ask them about all the people they met, and all the people those people met.

So, we believe that a large percentage of the population would take care of each other and help interrupt contagion if they only had a system to show them who is at risk of spreading Covid-19 and when it is safe to meet other people.

We are currently testing our system with 700 people, after starting with around 100 friends and family. Also, we are about to start a pilot with up to 70.000 people in Unicamp, the second largest Brazilian university. Their community needs to meet and to commute weekly back and forth from campus to their home towns, therefore increasing the risk of community transmission.

Circles.Health is free to all end users and will provide a way to protect from catching and spreading Covid-19 apart from allowing for mutual help in order to reduce stress and improve mental health through interaction.

Circles.Health can be used not only during the pandemic but to reduce the impact of any respiratory disease caused by virus transmission.

Also, Circles.Health can be used as an early warning system for new kinds of viruses. 

Although this is a solution to everyone who wants to support and be supported by friends and family, and to those who want to help stop the sars-cov-2 transmission, we are aware that the most impacted people are minorities like women, black communities and low income communities. That is why we've developed the system so it can be used with any smartphone, tablet or computer. We also want to implement Facebook Messenger as notification tool because in Brazil most low income people buy mobile data plans that include unlimited Facebook Messenger notifications.

The more people using Circles.Health, the less community contagion, less people will need to be isolated. This will have an economic, social and emotional impact since we will be able to resume more activities with safety.

Circles.Health is scalable by nature, relying on the creation of a distributed network. Partnering with key organizations will be the way to accelerate the process.

Last week we officially started our partnership with an 80,000 people university, Unicamp. If, on average, every user includes 3 other unique users in their Circle and each of those includes 3 more, we might reach 720,000 users originating from just one institution.

Also, we are negotiating contract terms for a pilot with 600 employees from a Brazilian health insurer. If successful, the pilot will lead to implementation for all employees, suppliers, and clients (totaling more than 300,000 first-layer unique users).

Nevertheless, conversations with Unicamp statisticians make us confident that Circles.Health will not only decrease Covid-19 spread but will positively impact people's mental health. Pilots will allow us to learn, create educational and promotional materials, improve UX, and take Circles.Health to other universities, cities, and countries. 

We believe we can reach 1 million users within one year, then expand to other Latin American countries and within two years work on a structured global expansion, also based on the fact its usage and benefits can, and hopefully will, last longer than this pandemic.

We currently measure:

- number of people using the system at least once a week

- number of new people invited by each user

- percentage of symptomatic users 

- percentage of "at risk" users (users who were in close proximity with symptomatic ones)

- transmission interruption

We plan to measure:

- number of people requesting and receiving assistance

- number of people reporting some kind of mental distress

- days in between a user informing symptoms and the next user in the same network informing symptoms

We want to partner with research institutes in order to study the impact of Circles.Health usage and epidemiological data to establish correlation between decrease in Covid-19 cases within the Circles.Health users.

Our main barriers are:

- We are not known and we are trying to launch a new interaction tool that needs mass adoption in order to work

- Infrastructure Costs: we actually don't know what our costs will be since we don't have a complete picture of how users are going to use the system. 

- We don't have the capacity to analyse and publish research on respected journals in order for our reputation to grow.

- We don't have arms to expand beyond Latin America.

- People thinking that our system is only relevant for another months until this pandemic is over

Semente Negócios (sementenegocios.com.br) is our accelerator

Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Unicamp (unicamp.br), the second largest university in Brazil and our partner in the first Pilot

We are applying for the possibility of receiving specific support from the Trinity Challenge partner's organisations. We believe that with the support specified on the next open question and an initial capital to support our organisation we will be well positioned to deliver our solution and raise further investments if needed.

- We are not known and we are trying to launch a new interaction tool. If we could implement our system within Facebook so all users could have instant access to it, it would significantly improve our chances at achieving mass adoption. We would also benefit from a partnership with Internews in order to communicate with potential users in order for them to adopt the solution and also communicate with current users from within the system.

- Infrastructure Costs: Since we want to make this system free to all end users, we would benefit if Google could lower or cut or server's costs. We also would like to use Facebook's Whatsapp as a notification tool in parallel or instead of Telegram, however the costs associated with the service don't allow us to do so.

- We don't have the capacity to analyse and publish research: Therefore we would welcome partnerships with Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Bluedot or Zenysis to help with data analysis and with Imperial College, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and Fiocruz to study and show the effects of Circles.Health on diminishing covid-19 transmission and improving mental health conditions. It would be import to use geolocalization with privacy for some of those studies and so Cuebiq could be a valuable ally.

- We don't have arms to expand beyond Latin America: We would appreciate a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to take Circles.Health to other continents, like Africa. 

- Behavioural analysis and change: We could partner with  Behavioural Insights Team in order to analyse how users are using the system, specially their difficulties and how all of this is being translated into their actual attitudes. 

- People thinking that our system is only relevant for another months until this pandemic is over: We believe our system can play a role in different diseases and also to prevent the next pandemic and therefore we would like to partner with the Global Virome Project.