Symptomed: A 'weather service' for public health early warning

A 'weather service' for forecasting and public health alerts in Southern Africa based on symptoms shared by patients.  Symptomed users share health data for community health, with enhanced privacy. Our analytics platform provides public health practitioners real time actionable risk insights across the Southern Africa region.   

Mantsika Matooane - Project and Technical Lead

The information gathering for Covid-19 relies on multiple healthcare providers sending data to a central public health service which then analyzes and  disseminates the information.  We believe a publish-subscribe model based on established Internet-of-things protocol can simplify the process, create near realtime access and enable earlier detection.  In addition, an over-reliance on healthcare providers leads to lag where patients with symptoms have not yet reported to a healthcare facility, and does not give patients privacy access to show who has access to their information.  

We enable realtime subscription to privacy-confirmed data for public health alerts.  This creates a mega 'weather service' where the target is healthcare, and the beacons are patients themselves.  The solution has to serve the dual purpose of privacy for patients but also enable realtime view including before health practitioner intervention.

Will patients be willing to share their data?  We believe the Covid-19 pandemic has raised awareness that health  of the community is integral to each person.  We give the patient the benefit of a health record in exchange for sharing their information.  

The solution, applied at good scale to the Southern Africa region will enable sharing of low cost, single platform across the region.  It enables patients to participate in public good as they are incentivised to ensure health of their communities based on great lockdown experiences in 2020.  The solution will be provided on low cost basis to public health services therefore any prize awards will be used for growing and developing out  technology teams in Lesotho and South Africa.  

We create a tangible public benefit for citizens in Southern Africa with a shared platform.  Early detection should hopefully avoid full blown emergencies resulting in lockdown and severe economic devastation in future. 

Should we receive funding for the project, we will be able to grow the team of data analysts and developers in Southern Africa.  We will also add healthcare specialists and healthcare economists.  We will rollout the public version of the app and begin the community rollout in South Africa and Lesotho.  We anticipate data collection for the first phase within one year.  In three years, we will be able to improve the solution, the healthcare applicability and meet analysis requirements that are not included in this phase.  In addition, we intend in 3 year time frame to add healthcare practitioner data for diagnosis and actual medical intervention (a form of telemedicine).   

We do not intend to scale geographically beyond Southern Africa.  However, we anticipate being able to integrate to similar solutions worldwide (or provide platform for other teams to deploy to other regions).  

We track our project goals and status on cloud project management tool that enables our work from home team to update status and track their tasks.

Project Goals:  Solution Development, Testing, Launch.  Status: On Track

Daily Patient Registrations:  Status: Not Yet Started

Total active patient users:    Status: Not Yet Started

Partnerships established for subscription: 1 ( this is the number of healthcare services that utilise the solution.  Our main target is public healthcare, however our initial partners are a non-profit that can utilise the realtime dashboard)

Diagnostic Partnerships: 1 

We need to grow the skills of our technology teams in South Africa and Lesotho.  We anticipate if we roll out to other countries we will need skills across Southern Africa.  

Access to mobile technology will remain a challenge in our target market.  We anticipate a version of our front-end for low specification phones to widen reach.  

 Integrating the healthcare diagnosis and other data is our next steps and we have one partnership in this area.   We have designed for minimal reliance on healthcare systems. 

However, even with these key challenges, our solution has potential to become affordable, low cost solution for early warning within the region.  

True Spark Investments (South Africa) https://truespark.co.za

BioAfrica https://www.bioafricaconvention.com

- We believe the Challenge is a good way of testing a social enterprise.  It will give us the confidence in the idea.

- We would like to access to become part of a global solution while maintaining local focus.  A solution for Southern Africa made in Southern Africa.  

-  We would like to invest in technical, healthcare skills in Southern Africa but lack the funding to be able to grow the team.

• We already use GoogleMaps API in our solution.  We would appreciate some support from Google team  on how to optimise this and additional expertise on BigData 

• Our diagnostics and health economics team has done a great job of designing affordable diagnostic kits that can be used in the solution.  We would appreciate partnership with University of Cambridge and with Pharmaceutical companies
• We will welcome partnership with medical device manufacturing partners who can assist with the refinement of the 'diagnostic kit' and scalable manufacturing