CovAID Introduction

CovAID is intended to become an app that can assist in a personal lock down of COVID-19, or any other contagious disease for that matter.
Highlights of the app are:

• Privacy: The app does not need any personal information in order for it to work
• Simple: The app can work with a minimum of information, that is just stored locally on your mobile phone
• Generic: In principle the approach can be applied to a wide variety of platforms

Obviously this also comes at a price. The best way of describing this, is to point out what CovAID is not:

• CovAID is not A diagnostics tool. It cannot assess whether you have COVID-19 or not:
• CovAID cannot prevent you from catching COVID-19. It merely makes a risk assessment of your chances of catching it
• CovAID is not an alert for COVID-19 victims. We do not believe in witch hunts!

The app is based on the theory of Symbiotic Networks. According to this theory, agents (e.g. people) can fight a threat in collaboration if two conditions are met:

• The threat allows itself to be quantified, and turned into a stress signal.
• The agents change their behaviour owing to the stress signals, in such a way that the stress becomes less

It can be proven if these two conditions are met, that the entire network will try to converge to a situation where the stress signals are as low as possible.
If we translate this to COVID-19, this means that every person gets a personalised risk assessment about the chances of getting COVID-19, and a means to determine an appropriate action to prevent this, that all the people who join this effort will make it increasingly difficult for COVID-19 to spread.

© MAAK! 2017-2018