Conotify.org

The project:

Our website Conotify.org allows people diagnosed or symptomatic of coronavirus to protect recently crossed contacts without tracking technology.

Our story:

​Currently, without treatment or vaccines, the key challenge to be tackled is how to break the chain of covid-19 contamination from one individual to another.​

Many contact-tracking solutions relying on GPS or bluetooth have been developed worldwide. They often pose important technological challenges (need for a smartphone, impact is dependent of the level of adoption of the application within the population), and their use of private data make them less acceptable in certain cultural contexts

For these reasons, we thought of a contact tracing solution able to limit the spread of the virus that does not use tracking technologies. We created the website Conotify.org, which digitizes the process of investigation of contact cases, which is carried out manually by medical investigators, and empowers any person tested positive or having symptoms of the Covid19 to carry it out herself.

The reason why we grounded our solution in the method of contact case investigation carried out manually by medical investigators, and recommended by the WHO, is that it has proven to be very efficient. Yet, it is also very costly in human resources and not fast enough. This cost poses a problem of scalability when the pandemic infections number rises to a critical level. The manual contact tracing method also implies inequality between countries: in Wuhan, 9,000 contact tracing investigators have been mobilised. Not all countries have the financial and the operational resources to deploy such a strategy.

In this sense, it was important for us to use innovation to avoid the saturation of manual contact tracing services and make it available to all countries.

We have aimed for a low-tech/high impact solution, and designed it so that:

It is inexpensive to deploy and maintain. The total costs associated with operating conotify.org are only based on the cost of hosting a website, and maybe the cost of sending text messages to persons who may have been contaminated

• It is inexpensive to deploy and maintain. The total costs associated with operating conotify.org are only based on the cost of hosting a website, and maybe the cost of sending text messages to persons who may have been contaminated

It does not exclude a large share of the population, as it does not require individuals to own a smartphone to use it. Rather our solution works as a website accessible from any device, and is only to be used once by persons who are covid+ or suspect that they have been contaminated.

• It does not exclude a large share of the population, as it does not require individuals to own a smartphone to use it. Rather our solution works as a website accessible from any device, and is only to be used once by persons who are covid+ or suspect that they have been contaminated.
  
• It is transparent and respectful of users privacy. Conotify.org does not store any personal data. The information provided by the user, such as symptoms or contact list, never leaves the memory of the user's interface (phone or computer) and therefore remains private. Moreover, the code of Conotify.org is also available in open-source, in order to allow its consultation and auditability by citizens and competent authorities in addition to being without GPS or bluetooth tracking technologies.

How does it work ?

Our website Conotify.org relies mainly on memo-technical means and secure API integrations.

The user first answers a few questions to assess a possible contamination, if he has not already been medically diagnosed or tested. Following this, a period of contagiousness is estimated according to the onset of symptoms and will allow the user to proactively identify cross-infected individuals. Thus, the site proposes to guide the user step by step in the construction of his list of "case contacts". Typical questions, memo-technical tips and optional and secure integrations with certain applications (such as the diary or telephone call history) support this approach.

Conotify.org will then synthesize a personalized message for the user in order to warn people he could have contaminated. The choice is also given to the user to use an anonymous sending service. Notified persons then receive the message containing personalized health instructions accompanied by a link to the web-application in order to be able to monitor the appearance of symptoms and, if necessary, warn a doctor. They will then be able to follow the procedure themselves on Conotify.org.

identification of possible obstacles and how they are to be overcome

With the launch of our website, we found that the effectiveness of our solution is highly dependent on distribution (reaching covid+ persons), and credibility (the fact that the website appears to be trustworthy and therefore that the notifications received have an impact on the behavior of the notified person). More precisely, the impact of Conotify.org does not rely on the virality of the platform, but rather on its ability to target and reach covid+ persons. In this context, one of the major obstacles that can prevent us from reaching our objectives would be a problem in distribution, if we failed to reach, and be used by the persons who are Covid+. The impact of our solution would be higher through partnership with public health institutions which would enhance both distribution and credibility.

As our platform does not use personal data, we do not anticipate major legal barriers. One market barrier could be that our UX/UI and the process of contact tracing embedded in Conotify.org does not easily replicate to different health/pandemics and cultural contexts. We think this risk is limited as we have modeled this process on practices already widely and long used by the WHO in different countries for various pandemics.

At the product distribution level, the barrier can be overcome by partnering with public health institutions. For example, a B2G model in collaboration with government or state institutions would allow us to be used as one of the official contact tracing processes to have a much more significant impact. Other forms of partnerships for distribution are possible if we encounter difficulties with governments, such as collaborations with private actors such as Nonprofits or doctors organizations, hospitals and other health organizations.

In this sense, we will choose countries to focus on according to the feasibility of these collaborations and the state of the pandemics, to ensure we can maximize our impact and remain focused in the use of our resources. In addition, our Nonprofit is used to working with public services, as this is the model we have used over the last four years for several of our technologies, in different fields.

The replicability of our tool to different pandemics context is ensured by the fact that it was created in collaboration with a scientific committee composed of doctors, who have guided the development to make the tool widely relevant to all type of pandemics situations.