A race against the clock to find tools to protect against contagion.

In March 2020, in the midst of all the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic that was ravaging the world and a confinement that was to last for weeks, several ideas and initiatives arose from entrepreneurs and companies to provide solutions from technology that could save lives.

Indra’s artificial intelligence company, Plaiground, asked us for help to devise and prototype in a matter of days the mobile application to be proposed to the Spanish Government for contagion control, following the model of South Korea and other countries, which were obtaining good results with the tracking of contacts and contagions.

There were several very disparate parallel initiatives and one had to lead with a quick and effective solution so as not to fall into the heterogeneity of solutions in such a complex situation.

The sensitivity of society at a time when our rights were being exceptionally altered with everything to do with privacy and data.

Various ways of tracking data are proposed for each case: GPS could solve movements throughout the day, or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to see which devices had been within x meters of the mobile, and therefore generate a list of contacts and exposure time for each day.

In addition to this, there was a challenge in the design and user experience. The situation was extreme and the colors, messages and processes of the application had to be very careful and have the necessary psychology to provide peace of mind and confidence even in the worst situation.

As for the management and operation of this technology, given that it could be used by millions of people, it had to be very scalable and have a dashboard to streamline communications through push notifications to users. This dashboard should allow segmenting communications by autonomous community, socio-demographic factors and user status.

Within 48 hours of the request, we had a specialized UX-UI team and a technology team working on the prototypes of the solution.

Within 72 hours from the request, we sent a draft of the project and a plan to develop it in 4 weeks, having a first testing version in the first 2 weeks with the basic functionality.

To do so, we proposed a team of specialists who would work in two shifts if necessary in order to speed up times as much as necessary.

We approved the start of the prototype with Indra and in the first week, we had the cloud architecture deployed and the interactive UX-UI prototype. The challenge of doing something so momentous in such a short time pushed our team to the limit, so we chose the best specialists available to us.

Self-testing, visibility of virus exposure and control of personal data

Make a self-diagnosis, something that at that time had just been deployed on a page of the Community of Madrid. The advantage is that the self-diagnosis could be updated both by the user (and actively asked about it) and by the authorities to add new questions to help them understand the disease and symptoms. These data were declarative.

Make the user involved and aware of the methods of capturing the data and let them turn it on and off at any time.

Exposure level and declarative symptom updates in case of reported contagion, as well as useful tips (which can also be managed from a dashboard).

Access and transparency to the data provided and collected by each user and the possibility to delete them.

Communications management and information control.

On the other hand, the management and communications application allowed, by selecting with sociodemographic and position filters, to send notifications and recommendations to users, even scheduling them through an intuitive system and saving them in sections.

In addition, the forms displayed in the app are fully customizable from the dashboard.

An artificial intelligence algorithm was developed to track cases with the data obtained. In parallel, both Google and Apple reached an agreement to build a contagion tracking API that could be used by the “official” application of each country, providing a standard data system for all regions.

Despite the similarity, the final result, implementation and maintenance of the app known as Radar COVID has NOT been done by The Cliff.

The government decided to develop the app with another technology and another provider, using the UX-UI approach we did from The Cliff. After 3 months, they released the Radar COVID app, which did not contain most of the functionality developed in our app, but was clearly inspired by it as a design basis.