Dimitrina Vasileva says April 12, 2020 at 12:03 am Another option is to start fresh with a coronavirus-specific app that asks users to voluntarily share their location and health data. For example, a basic symptom-checking app could do more than just keeping people who don’t need urgent care out of overstretched emergency rooms, says Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. Health researchers could use also use location data from the app to estimate the size of an outbreak. “That could be done, I think, without risking being evil,” he says. Reply
Mywish Maredia says April 13, 2020 at 12:22 pm Thanks for sharing your idea. For researchers interested in tracking the spread of COVID-19, an App that asks users to voluntarily share their location and health data is an excellent idea. I think giants like Apple and Google may be already leading such effort for contact tracing. See this announcement blog from Google. https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/apple-and-google-partner-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology. In a developing country context, the limitation of such App based crowd sourcing of data is that it may be constraint by the low penetration of smartphones. But such method of crowd sourcing data for research purpose holds some promise as and when the smart phones become widely adopted. Reply