NoPeek Privacy

Global health crises occur every 5-10 years, often emerging in communities with the most health disparities who are underserved by public health agencies. As a result, health policies in these communities are reactionary - placing policy into effect well after the viral life cycle has begun; therefore these citizens suffer the highest disease burden and most fatalities. Digital tools can change this.  Our mission is to harness the tremendous computational power that smartphones have to influence our lives. 

With over 260 million smartphone users in the United States alone and over 3 billion users worldwide, is it imperative that we demonstrate that smartphones can play a positive role when responding to public health crises. 

With our "NoPeek" Privacy technology, we plan to change reactionary health policies by creating digital tools that assist policymakers, public health officials, and health systems agents to respond faster and support vulnerable populations. PathCheck’s public health “NoPeek” Privacy framework for citizen engagement is an open source universal verification system developed for exposure notifications, contact tracing, and vaccine verification. This free, personalized, open source toolkit and mobile application can deliver any organization “NoPeek” computational privacy software created at MIT that captures crowdsourced health information, analyzes the data for public/precision health, and engages citizens via personalized recommendations based on data obtained within the app. All of which can be done using a smartphone.   

Our solution is a novel open-source computational privacy software from MIT and PathCheck that captures crowdsourced health information, analyzes it for public and precision health, and engages users via personalized recommendations. We provide computational techniques to handle the five steps of the pandemic progress - exposure, symptoms onset, test, treatment, and vaccination. 

Our platform supports underserved communities by using crowdsourced data collection while preserving privacy through our "NoPeek" Privacy framework for maintaining privacy standards. This framework was designed to engage communities on every aspect of the pandemic response while working within the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework. Our Karuna app was widely used by over 1MM citizens in India and Indonesia to crowdsource the availability of hospital beds during various waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Those who can leverage this application:

Citizens - underserved communities

Doctors/ Health Practitioners

County / State Health Officials

Communities officers - Various communities across US

From reporting of symptoms that can help predict the next communicable disease, to grievances from anonymous citizens, we at PathCheck would be working towards an equitable yet crowdsourced health reporting system. 

Our toolkit provides services and computational methods at each step:

1.Exposure - We provide a privacy-preserved solution for exposure notification and contact tracing.

2.Symptom onset - The users can upload their symptoms and keep track of how the disease is progressing. Furthermore, they have access to download the symptom trajectory of other users in the same demographic and comorbidities group.

3.Test - We provide a solution to find the nearest testing sites, schedule testings, and also create verifiable credentials to share testing results. Further, if the user agrees, they can share the data (in a privacy-preserving way) with the health officials who can learn more about the population-level trends of the disease.

4.Treatment - The users can upload their ongoing treatment and what their recovery trajectory looks like. In addition, similar to the symptoms curve, the users can also access the treatment progression curves of the relevant group (based on demographics, comorbidities, etc).

5.Vaccination - We have the solution for vaccine scheduling, second dose reminder, adverse event reporting, etc along with verifiable and tamper-proof credentials. Moreover, we offer this with the help of low-tech solutions - paper credentials as well.

Our software also helps in the availability of information related to Pandemic spread and communicable diseases across the globe through a participatory crowdsourced epidemiology model, through an app interface for people to receive exposure alerts, keeping privacy preserved. Our Evidence-based early warning system helps administer, over-the-counter treatment plans, and the availability of healthcare facilities resources such as hospital beds, oxygen supply, and nearest vaccination booths.

Two years into the COVID pandemic, the health inequities that have medically disenfranchised millions of patients remain and there is not a universal remedy. 

PathCheck believes that all individuals, no matter their background, geographical location or race deserve to participate in and benefit from public health solutions. Families living at or below the $5 PPP per day poverty line are disproportionately black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC). Therefore, we have partnered with Hood Medicine (https://www.hoodmedicine.org/), a nonprofit organization focused on overcoming health disparities in underserved BIPOC communities with a focus on preventing and reducing racial bias and increasing trust in public health. Hood Medicine is committed to deploying the PathCheck Public Health app because of its privacy-first approach. 

Additionally, to avoid perpetuating this tragic compounding of inequity, we need to ensure vulnerable populations are supported by health agencies. We need to explore innovative ways to extract bias from the processes not only for the benefit of perennially underserved communities who are most vulnerable to the considerable institutional and public health failures, but also so we can accurately track and assess the true picture of public health crises, incidence, and other chronic diseases symptoms, and ensure whatever appropriate standards of care are equitably applied to all patient populations.

With our privacy-preserving approach, every individual is benefited with one care, one health, one platform. That is our motto - OneHealth - an equitable initiative for all communities inclusive, to end the inequalities and bring more equitable healthcare visibility. 

According to PEW Research in 2021, smartphones remain the top technology platform that lower-income populations use to access information online in the absence of connectivity at home. Therefore, equitable access means making data and information accessible within this format, or distributing devices to community leaders in the absence of device ubiquity.  The underlying technology is also extensible to feature phones with SMS and community desktop computers (libraries, community centers). The empowerment of choice across these platforms will contribute to the wide accessibility for our solutions among a global population at or below the $5 PPP per day poverty line.

We have 3 audiences:

1. Public health agency (PHA) planners: we create a data-rich stream of citizen activity to fill the gaps and complement other data gathering efforts to understand case rates, severity of symptoms, equitable deployment, lower cost of impact evaluation and interviews and effectiveness for vulnerable populations. 

2. Organizations with large campuses : here the decision-makers usually take the lead in adopting innovation and expensive solutions to ensure safety. We hear a significant frustration among these leaders through our user research as they have to wait for city or state solutions. Hence we improve resilience and confirm effectiveness with A/B trials on different campuses of the same organization. 

3. Citizens (with a focus on vulnerable populations). We create early alerts of exposure, personalized risk scores for activities based on their health conditions, and visualizing local conditions of the spread are critical. We focus on communities driven healthcare queries, use the crowdsourced data to provide and allocate necessary resources. 

In terms of Privacy, our solution works for citizens without a smartphone. We developed a paper-based QR code with cryptographically tamper-evident digital signatures for citizens to engage in the test-trace-treat-vaccinate ecosystem without disclosing any personally identifiable information. 

We started with the USA, India and Cyprus . We are planning to expand to Nigeria and Brazil as well to capture views from a wide variety of audiences and refine our hypothesis at various consumer touch points. 

In this regard, our user research surveys helped gauge a few points:. 

Penetration of mobile phones ( not always smart phones) even in rural areas. 

Skewed awareness regarding private information. 

People's ability to scan QR scan codes due to Google pay etc. 

People's lack of awareness about the data gaps in public health regimes.   

Consumers' demand for the technical solutions to be non-obtrusive.  

This helped us understand the importance of developing a robust data capture system. But to create awareness and reach a wide spectrum of people, it is crucial to enable privacy preserved data capture systems. Also, to increase downstream adoptions, our solution will be enabled through what users already have, like smartphones/normal phones/card-based systems ,which ensures its ubiquitousness and human centered design.

PathCheck has deep expertise in building and deploying privacy-preserving, open-source, universal verification software. Led by a diverse team of technologists, data scientists and public health policy experts, in addition to a volunteer network that is approximately 3,500 strong, the experience and talent within PathCheck is unmatched. Within PathCheck Foundation are 2 institutes that work with academic partners to create fellowship opportunities: Data Informatics Center for Epidemiology (DICE), and the Institute for Technology and Global Health (ITGH). 

Our founder, Ramesh Raskar, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab who has dedicated his career to Machine Learning and Imaging for health and sustainability. His research spans in physical (e.g., sensors, health-tech), digital (e.g., automated and privacy-aware machine learning) and global (e.g., geomaps, autonomous mobility) domains. 

Our President, Graham Dodge is the founding CEO of Sickweather, a novel disease surveillance company that served 10MM daily active users, as well as is a patented inventor, public speaker and population health expert with experience designing and deploying large consumer platforms and systems of intelligence using big data and prediction tools. He is also a Mentor-In-Residence at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.

Additionally, our 2,500+ volunteer base is international and they strongly guide the needs, design, messaging, and prioritization of the solutions in different regions.

Data silos in healthcare persist due to concerns, whether real or feigned, for privacy protection by companies controlling those data.  NoPeek Privacy simultaneously enables data sharing while tearing down these silos. While PathCheck Foundation’s NoPeek Privacy framework has been widely adopted, issuing over 1 Billion certificates since 2020, our organization is still very young and requires financial support to educate end users and distribute the NoPeek Privacy Toolkit beyond its initial use in supporting the COVID-19 pandemic response.

The healthcare industry is now littered with applications that were designed to send exposure notifications, track symptoms and ease the burden of contact tracing. Unfortunately, many of these applications are being decommissioned or forgotten as reactionary tools imposed upon the public explicitly for COVID-19. Yet, other disease outbreaks are still consistent around the world impacting vulnerable populations. 

What makes PathCheck’s solution innovative is our focus on telemetry and crowdsourcing during and between outbreaks, wherein citizens can begin disease reporting directly to governments privately (if they choose) and health organizations which in turn provides a mechanism for governments to launch solutions at the onset of emerging infectious diseases. This mechanism is meant to be the application of record during a health crisis, one that citizens can use to find the nearest testing site, schedule testing, and also create verifiable credentials to share testing results. This real-time information is crucial to protect vulnerable communities as they will be able to collect data themselves, while also providing governments and health organizations the chance to swiftly respond during the initial phase of an outbreak, not following the viral life cycle.    

PathCheck’s open source solution is well tested and proven for privacy, security, quality, and behavioral factors; in addition to its epidemiological scientific rigor. 

PathCheck’s open-source, open platform solutions are built to scale, as evidenced by our partnerships with the WHO and other public health agencies, having now served over 10MM citizens globally. Using PathCheck's "NoPeek" Privacy, we will continue to partner with public health agencies around the world in order to create network effects of increased citizen engagement, develop trust, respond effectively and capture lessons learned in order to enhance and improve public health responses multilaterally across all agencies. 

We will also continue to partner with Google and Apple to ensure compatibility and compliance with their respective devices and to ensure the latest operating system and hardware capabilities and requirements are aligned with our code base, creating opportunities for cross promotion and shared success stories. 

Year 1: Formally build "NoPeek" Privacy Public Health App, server, and dashboard 

• Build software stack

• Secure additional funding

• Expand team

• Host workshop with stakeholders and early pilot partners

• Initiate standards conversation for pandemic data exchange

• Create a platform for underserved communities and focus on inequality issues
  
  

Year 2: Focused on rolling out initial pilots 

• Focus on our 4 confirmed campus partners in four countries

• Confirming the effectiveness via randomized control trials. 

• We will run these A/B in different campuses of the same organization.

• We will hone our approach (paper credentials, etc.) with vulnerable and underserved communities. Our project target audience will be 2 Million in the second year.

Year 3:  Goals center on solidifying and expanding these pilots 

• Ensuring that this set of software, partners, and practices can be scaled and used at dozens of other countries and institutions.

• Written case studies and testimonials

• Opportunistically, deploy in a real outbreak if it emerges

• We will focus on creating a larger audience at a scale of 6 Millions from the underserved community. 

• We want to propose a plan of Equitable Community Champions for each of the community that will create a larger network of communities

Year 4 and Year 5 : Build an equitable underserved community center of Health Care ecosystem  

• We need to create a center of Excellence that focuses on Equitable healthcare for vulnerable communities. 

• With this center of excellence, appx. 20 M members of underserved communities can have their health inequalities addressed. This will be a point of address for future Policies on equitable healthcare across US and territories where the solution gets expanded to. 

• Work with healthcare leaders to a more sustainable policy focusing on healthcare equity. 

PathCheck measures its progress with the following key metrics: 

Metric 1 - Lives touched by PathCheck exposure notification apps

During the pandemic, the PathCheck Foundation partnered with several states, countries, and territories to launch exposure notification applications that were designed to improve privacy, app use, COVID-19 diagnosis reporting, and compliance with social distancing guidelines per geographic area.

As a result, the PathCheck Foundation designed and built applications that saw thousands of downloads throughout the pandemic. For example: 

PathCheck launched the COVID Defense application with the state of Louisiana and saw over 46,000 downloads. - Total Android downloads for COVIDaware MN: 319,873

Total iOS downloads for COVIDaware MN: 236,647

Metric 2 - Volunteers

The PathCheck Foundation remains committed to engaging and educating the next generation of data-aware public health servants. PathCheck has facilitated a network of scientists, designers, engineers and volunteers who come together to collaborate, and share best-practices to enhance co-learning at local, national and international levels. The PathCheck Foundation has established a volunteer network of 3,600, many of whom have touched upon the projects lead by the foundation.  

Moreover, the PathCheck Foundation established its ‘Training Incentive Program’ to enable volunteers to participate in projects, training and courses that support their desire to contribute towards many activities such as writing academic papers, drafting proposals, building apps, building frameworks, designing screens, designing layouts and launching digital health companies. This program is designed to motivate individuals to participate and showcase their contributions to the world.

As a result of PathCheck’s extended global network and training opportunities, volunteers have been accepted to undergraduate institutions such as Harvard and MIT; been accepted into graduate and Ph.D. programs; volunteers have come together as co-founders to launch new public health businesses; and volunteers have found new professional opportunities with partner organizations. 

Metric 3 - Security, Innovation and Reach

It is well known that using open-source software provides an increase in security, innovation, and reach. The PathCheck Foundation has written all of its source code on the open source GitHub platform in order to promote collaboration as well as flexibility that allows the foundation to respond more rapidly to the changing public health environment. Through the GitHub community, the PathCheck Foundation has worked with programmers from all over the world to create its privacy-preserved, open source software that allows global public health agencies and governments to respond to the pandemic more rapidly. In addition to enhancing its code and open source software with the contributions of these programmers, each programmer has the opportunity to build their coding resume by contributing to building the unique open source software that is the basis for PathCheck technology.  

As the PathCheck Foundation has made its open source code available to the public, it has currently seen over a billion credentials shipped, and its code has had over 30 contributions, this is a large number for the GitHub community considering the median contribution is estimated at 1-2. 

There are two reasons that PathCheck’s solution will have an impact on future responses during health crises. 

The first is that the applications using PathCheck’s "NoPeek" Privacy will support Health Agencies and Elected Officials to begin the process of repairing trust between themselves and citizens. During a health crises, it is imperative for citizens to trus the information they are receiving from their public officials, and for public officials to be able to leverage information provided by citizens. 

If we do not continue the work to provide Public Health agencies and citizens with the latest technology and tools, then the world and its most vulnerable populations living at or below the poverty line will be no better prepared for the next health crisis than at the beginning of COVID-19. Meanwhile, fragmented and shortsighted efforts, and changes in leadership, will continue to undermine citizen engagement with public health agencies.

The second reason is that PathCheck’s solution will help to bridge the health information gaps to give Public Health agencies the information they need to make informed decisions. Through “NoPeek” privacy, open-source universal verification systems developed for exposure notifications, contact tracing and vaccine verification will help Public Health Agencies paint an accurate picture of current needs. Officials will have access to surveys from citizens to understand how their county/ states are performing. In addition, Citizens will also have access to this data which will ultimately support the effort of achieving a health equitable system.

The core technology enabling our bottom-up crowdsourcing methodology are No-Peek privacy-preserving techniques developed jointly with MIT.   We leverage the usage of split learning and differential privacy to capture the data from people. To get insights from the data, we developed machine learning and deep learning models that can predict prevalence, and forecast outbreaks based on self-reported population-level aggregated symptoms data, and NPI prescription models. To provide the best interventions, we developed multi-agent reinforcement learning models for prescribing non-pharmaceutical interventions, given the current state of the disease and economic impact. Traditionally simulating such large population data takes tremendous time, hence we develop a novel DeepABM system that makes use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to scale agent-based models to run simulations with 100,000s agents in less than a few seconds.

Public health agencies are the primary aggregator of the data generated by our toolkit. They currently use the data for contact tracing, exposure notifications and vaccine verification for COVID-19, but with further education and increased adoption they could also use it for assessing overall health risk of a population and as a means to distribute warnings and notifications for everything from emerging infectious diseases to water boil alerts.

The leaderships of the PathCheck Foundation come from diverse backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, education, gender etc. The organization has been focused on advocating for gender and racial equality, and promoting initiatives and partnering with organizations that help reduce the racial and gender gap in the health ecosystem exacerbated by the pandemic. PathCheck is focused on using science for good to tirelessly enhance equitable healthcare access and outcomes.

 PathCheck focuses on engaging underserved communities to advocate for science and health education, and preventative medicine.

1. Based on our previous work and goals, we build on existing relationships with governments and partners established in 2021. 

• We have demonstrated extremely promising results in our first year.  Our team has experience in working with governments and campuses to help them deploy our solutions. 

• As a B2B solution, we play an active role in promoting adoption through our playbook and shared best practices across pilots and earlier deployments.

2. Years 1-3 we will scale with local partners and with network effects.  Having credible validation evaluations of our pilot results is essential for industry confidence.

• Scaling with local partners: Our pilots are ‘light house’ deployments on four continents, and those references will guide campus-specific implementation in other parts of the world. We work with local health-IT companies to deploy, which allows us to dramatically scale while remaining lean at PathCheck. 

Network Effect: We create a network effect by encouraging employers to suggest the app to their employees and staff on their campuses. These early adopters will in turn spread the word of the app’s usefulness to other citizens in their daily lives.

With the newly announced budget by the Biden administration to support Pandemic planning, we look forward to collaborating with multiple county/state and even with the federal government to make customizations to the open-source solutions that we built. Additionally, we also plan to work with institutions and other organizations with large campuses to deploy our solutions. In the past, we had raised $2.6 Million to impact 20 Million end users at peak pandemic response. Our clients have been mostly state governments and local authorities of the US apart from citizens across the world, but we can work with large employers with global workforce populations to deploy our technology based on a Per Employee Per Month (PEPM) revenue model. We also launched the Karuna app, a crowdsourced epidemiology and Pandemic response app in India and Indonesia which can be easily retooled as a general disaster response app that uses NoPeek Privacy.

In 2020-21, we raised 2.6 million USD in donations and grants Additionally, PathCheck generated 1.2 million USD in revenue for a total of 3.8 million USD. This is based on our work with various state and county-level governments for the EN solution we provided. Recently, we partnered with the WHO to work on universal health credentials.

Apart from these, our data science team had won the Facebook Data for Good Pandemic challenge and other competitions from NIST, XPRIZE etc.