The Danish Government has announced two new digital solutions to drive the safe and controlled reopening of Denmark, once the government mandated lockdown due to COVID-19 is lifted.
Developed in collaboration between Netcompany and the National Board of Digitisation the broad national emergency applications are designed for use by both the Danish health authorities and citizens, to support coronavirus efforts.
COVIDmeter – Monitoring the Prevalence of COVID-19
COVIDmeter will collect information from citizens about disease symptoms in relation to COVID-19. Users will be encouraged to fill out a digital questionnaire about their health on a weekly basis, allowing authorities to assess the development of the epidemic.
Symptoms, recovering status after COVID19, and many other metrics are collected using the solution, which will be used by the Danish Serum Institute to monitor the spread of infection in the community.
Mobile Proximity App – helping Denmark lift its lockdown
In addition to COVIDmeter, the Danish Government is also introducing a Bluetooth-enabled Mobile Proximity App will detect contact within 1-2 meters with others who also have the app, providing essential information to both the government and the citizen about COVID-19 contact patterns.
The first version of the app was developed on a pro-bono basis by Netcompany and has been chosen by the Danish health authorities as the basis for a national solution.
The app, which uses Bluetooth technology will continuously scan for other discoverable devices and will notify citizens of how many contacts one has had during the day of a certain proximity and length. This is also very useful for authorities in terms of whether population is adhering to overall advice from government in terms of keeping distance after gradually opening up society. Hence the app is believed to have a positive impact on responsible behaviour. The app can also be used to help in tracing disease spread when citizens are infected by the coronavirus.
Health authorities will only be able to use data from the app to follow up on the spread of the infection on an aggregated and pseudonymised level. Therefore, it will not be possible to trace movement patterns back to the individual person.
André Rogaczewski, Netcompany CEO and Co-founder commented on the launch; “Whilst projection models can estimate the spread of the disease, the accuracy of these models can only be understood and validated at the point of impact. Real-time data is crucial for government to understand citizen contacts and potential infections, in order take informed decisions to manage society restrictions.
“In the coming weeks, these digital solutions will strengthen the database for the Danish health authorities’ ongoing epidemiological surveillance of the spread of infection and thus support decisions on the gradual opening of society. We are proud to be supporting the national effort to safely reopen Denmark, and would like to offer the platform to other nations planning life after lockdown.”
The Mobile Proximity App will be available to the Danish public within the next two weeks.