Circles.Health

Interrupting the transmission of a virus is the single most important step to prevent, contain or scale back an epidemic/pandemic. Current centralised strategies like lockdowns and contact-tracing are financially and emotionally costly and oftentimes require privacy invasion. 

During partial lockdowns, most people rely on chat apps to ask if family, friends and colleagues are feeling well, before deciding if meeting is safe. This creates a false sensation of safety, since diseases like Covid-19 are spread before the carrier becomes symptomatic in 50% of the cases.

Our distributed system, Circles.Health, allows people to monitor their own protection network up to three degrees of separation. When someone informs they have symptoms or was in close contact with a symptomatic person, the network is notified and can self-isolate, interrupting transmission. It allows for fast and targeted lockdowns, bringing down the infection curve and preventing another pandemic from happening.

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.

Circles is a distributed exposure notification system. According to Dr. Larry Brillian, an epidemiologist that helped eradicate smallpox said in this article that exposure notification systems are much better than contact-tracing ones.

Circles allow poeple to invite loved ones, friends, colleagues to create a P2P network of care. When someone answers one daily question saying they might have symptoms associated with Covid-19 or other respiratory diseases, the system directs them to seek medical help and informs everyone on the persons circle that they should not meet until that person gets tested.

At the backend, Circles connects all the P2P networks created by the user in a large network that allows governments and organisations to visualize pockets of outburst.

Circles is completely private and distributed. The users decides who will see their answers while we provide anonymized data for relevant organizations.

We are also testing a new optional feature that will allow users to include other questions to the system, related to their emotional wellbeing. When a user is feeling depressed, their circles of care will know and will be able to provide support early on.

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.

Our solution is aligned with two dimensions of the challenge, "Strengthen disease surveillance" and "Combat loneliness, stress, depression" because it is both an exposure notification system and network of mutual care.

We've decided to create the system as a light web based app in order to allow anyone with an internet connection to use it without the need of much computing power. Here in Brazil, most of the population has smartphone, but a lot don't have space to download another app. That's why our system has more adoption potential than others in the market. 

We are currently testing our product on the second biggest Brazilian university called Unicamp. There are approximately 80k (eighty thousand) people within the Unicamp community including students, teachers and other staff. The test started at the end of Abril 2021 and by the time of this submission there are currently XYZ active users.

We are also piloting it at Porto Seguro Saúde, one of the largest Health Insurers in Brazil. 

We've shown Circles to epidemiologists, virologists, and public health experts and all of them said that the fact that the user is responsible to create and inform its own circles of loved ones, friends, colleagues makes this solution unique. All the other solutions depend on a centralize entity, like a government or organisation, trying to convince people to share their status. 

Circles is different. The user is not helping the government or an employer. The user is caring for people they love, without being surveilled and without the fear of having their data used by people they don't trust.

The second innovation of Circles is the creation of a network with 3 degrees of separation from the user. In that way, if the contact of a contact's contact informs having symptoms, everyone around will be alerted and will be able to answer if they had contact with that symptomatic person. If they answer "yes", all of their contacts will be notified that even though the person is not feeling any symptoms, they were in contact with a potential infected individual. In that way, we interrupt the contagion chain even for asymptomatic carriers. This is extremely helpful in a vaccinated context where people start meeting each other, but a lot of people are not yet immunised or the vaccine is not as protective agains new variants.

The third innovation is to coupling contagion control with emocional health care, allowing groups of people to seek support early on.

We have 850 people using our solution as we speak. But it is available for all the 80k Unicamp members.

Porto Seguro wants to do a pilot with 600 employees but its goal is to provide the solution to its 300k clients. If 10% of these clients use the system and is able to create a network of 50 unique individuals we will reach one and a half million people by next year only from one organization.

Our basic metrics are:

Number of new users per day

Number of people a user include in their networks

Number of answers per user per week

Number of people who get symptoms after someone in their network notified having symptoms

We are 3 full time staff (business and solution development), 2 part time (legal, admin, marketing) and 4 contractors (software development)

Our core team is composed by 3 people with combined 30 years of entrepreneurial expertise. We all had previous startups and before that were successful executives in our fields. 

We met 5 years ago in a distributed finance project called Prospera. Prospera was the first real Distributed Autonomous Organisation in Brazil. After the sudden death of its founder, Oswaldo Oliveira, two of the people closest to him, MArcelo Michelsohn and Diogo Carlotto decided to join forces and keep his dream alive. Our experience with distributed system led a medical doctor who was living in Italy during the worst Covid-19 outbreak to call us, saying: " Could you use your different way of thinking in order to create a solution for Covid-19"? We stopped our other projects and jumped in to this challenge.

Later on we added Daniel Carlotto who has amazing design an marketing skills in order to help create and spread our brand. 

And last but not least, Marcio Jappe, from Semente Negócios (a startup accelerator) joined us in his private and organisational capacity in order to structure the administration processes and allow us to capture capital and develop our business. 

Due to his previous work on an international organisation as a Sustainability Vice President, Marcelo Michelsohn was able to show Circles to people in high places at Universities, Banks, Pharma and Insurance companies.

Our first diversity initiative was to hire Lanceiros Tech as our software developer. Lanceiros' developers are all black and from low income communities.

More recently we asked Marcio Jappe to bring Camila Devaux to support our team because we were missing a woman's perspective and approach.

Some people in our team are also from the LGBTQ+ community and we create an environment where they can bring their full selves to the table.

Sincerely, we are applying to Solve because we want people to know about our solution. We believe and we've heard from epidemiologists that if people use Circles.Health we can help save many lives and get people back to work on a safe way. MIT Solve would make our solution visible and credible.

We would also like to be part of MIT Solve's network in order to connect with partners that could help us improve our impact by taking it to other countries, by publishing articles on the impact of our solution, by improving our technology,

We know our solution works. What we don't know is how to make people not only use it (answer about symptoms everyday) but also for users to ask their contacts to use it and help their contacts create their own networks. We need people to create their own Circles of protection. We understood that we can convince the first layer of users to use the system, but we didn't find a way to support them in spreading the word.

That's why we need publc relations help in order for more people to know and trust the solution.

We also don't know how to keep the initiative financially sustainable. We need help from business developers to work with us in how to scale and reach people, keeping the system free to the end user.

And lastly, we will need help to track our results and show our data to help governments and agencies to improve their pandemic responses.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: support to take Circles.Health to Africa

Yum! Brands: to help position ourselves to the users and to the financiers

Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology: in order to study and publish the results of Circles.Health's impact in communities.

We understand the pandemic is increasing the number of mental health issues in the US, not only form the isolation but also as long-Covid symptom. We would use this funding to develop a specific emocional support system for the US population based on our technology of distributed P2P mutual support.