Introduction

Path check products exist to provide privacy protecting technology solutions that can be leveraged as part of digital contact tracing processes to slow the spread of COVID19.

Segments

• Members of Public

  • Smartphone users

  • Underserved

• Public Health Authorities

  • Contact Tracers

  • Public Health Officials

• Employers / Businesses

  • Private Sector

  • Education

  • Hospitals?

  • Brands (Amex? Weather Apps?)

• Public Spaces

  • Tourism destinations

  • Places of worship

  • Venues

Products

• Safe Paths - Currently GPS Based mobile application.

  • Additional protocols (BTE, Beacons, Magnetometer, Ultrasound) and Integrations (Fever-reporting data) added as needed.

  • Support personal historical exposure history notifications, future trip and travel planning, self-reporting health and wellness for personal use, and engagement with health authorities and employers.

• Safe Places - A Web Application for Public Health Authorities to augment digital contact tracing with location and encounter history from Safe Paths mobile app.

  • Safe Places enables health authorities to engage anonymously with Safe Paths users based on user’s self-reported symptoms to preserve privacy and facilitate contact tracing initiatives including contact tracing incentive dispersement, quarantine verification.

• Safe Business (Spaces?)_ - A Web Application for Business Owners (Venue operators?) integrated with Safe Paths that allows:

  • Users to anonymously donate their data (self-reporting, testing results) with others at the facility who visit that facility.

  • Beacons to monitor and enforce certain cleanliness standards to ensure public safety reported back to the Safe Paths app after the area has been cleaned.

  • Appointment scheduling for Safe Paths Users at that business to ensure appropriate social distancing and capacity constraints are met.

• Path Check GAEN - GAEN bluetooth based mobile app.

• Safe Work Places - Web application for Employer HR / Contact Tracers to augment digital contact tracing with location and encounter history from Safe Paths mobile app

  • Supports integrations with AEP/Major Insurers/Et et.

  • Coordinate and verify corporate travel duty of care needs are met, and verify to business partners your staff is safe.

• Safe Bands - Wearable for non-smartphone users

• Safe Droid - Cheap Android Devices Outfitted Exclusively for Use for Contact Tracing (great for loved ones!).

• Safe SDK - Leverage Safe Paths network in your App!

Capabilities

• Public Health Contact Tracing interview augmentation

• Self Reporting / Symptom self-assessment

• Localized heat maps

• Exposure Notifications to members of the community

• Business/Public Space notification subscriptions

• Non-smartphone location logging and notifications

• Employer Contact Tracing interview augmentation

• Location and Symptom Diaries

• Forward planning (Waze for Covid) for individuals, employees, and businesses.

• Bypass quarantine when traveling to new jurisdictions (you don’t have to wait 14 days).

• Quarantine verification

• Incentive dispersement

• SDK? (not really a capability)

Client Products and Capabilities Matrix

Server Products and Capabilities Matrix

Adoption of Path Check products

Much of the adoption of Path Check products depends on public perception of trust and privacy protection along with relevant services and capabilities to each market segment.

Value Propositions to each Segment

• Members of Public

  • Get exposure notifications

  • Get relevant public health information

  • Local area heat maps of infections

  • Meet obligation to Employers who ask employees to download

  • Meet obligation to Venues who ask visitors to download

  • Meet obligation to public health who ask community members to download

  • Meet obligation to tourist destinations without having to quarantine

• Public Health Authorities

  • Discover otherwise unknown close contacts who may have been exposed

  • Provide relevant community engagement mechanism over COVID19

  • Scalabley provide care and support to at-risk and Covid+ individuals.

• Employers / Businesses

  • Receive notification if any COVID positive spent time on their campus

  • Verify when their environment has been cleaned when exposed.

  • Allow users to engage with their facilities safely through scheduling, appointments, and

• Public Spaces

  • Receive notification if anyone COVID positive spent time at their venue

Adoption Friction

Like many products, the Path Check ecosystem has a strong dependence on network effect. Public Health and Employers who are leveraging Path Check Products in conjunction with members of the public downloading the mobile app at significant numbers.

Adoption friction is further compounded by several factors which have a variety of solutions:

• With no SaaS based approach to Public Health or Employer software solutions, the consumer GPS based mobile app offers little to no value for the majority of those who download it.

• With Bluetooth / GAEN, not only does each State/Nation need to be setup, but value to the public is not significant until significant public adoption is reached.

• With a white-label open source approach to delivering software to Public Health and other segments, adoption rates will be extremely slow

• With Digital Contact tracing being a new market, there’s very little proof of a given approach being effective. Anyone serious in this space has to go slow enough to learn and iterate, incorporating epidemiological feedback and improvements prior to rapid scale.

• The Public Health Authorities (PHA) moving the fastest are the smaller ones, who can operate with some autonomy. Large nations and states are proceeding cautiously.

• Many of the fast moving PHA’s are nations with low smartphone adoption, making any DCT solution which depends on significant smartphone or recent model smartphone adoption a significant challenge

• Many societies are extremely privacy conscious, meaning one false step on privacy / security, even just from a perception standpoint will likely end any chance for broad adoption.

• To most PHA’s, the phrase “digital contact tracing” actually maps to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software used for DCT, not the product we are building. As these CRM’s are rolled out, they may block market opportunities for our product adoption even without overlapping features.

Adoption Accelerators

• Provide value to the public downloading the app without a network effect between PHA and consumers.

  • Symptom reporting via self-reporting capabilities

  • Showing local area heat-maps

• Integrate additional PHA solutions / capabilities which lead to members of the public download the app before becoming infected carriers

  • Investigation team asking 2nd tier contacts to download the app to report symptoms

• Provide Employer solutions which result in Employers encouraging employees to download the app to return to work safely

• Provide Public Spaces solutions which result in Venues / Tourist Destinations encouraging visitors to download the app to visit safely

• Provide solutions (wearables?) that don’t depend on smartphone adoption.

• Provide significant / empirically measurable value to fighting the COVID19 pandemic to early adopters

  • Market the hell out of early successful results and write the best DCT white paper the world’s seen to date.

• Get privacy / security right, from the start. Engage media early, lean into providing transparency to privacy hawks and critics.

• Partner with a major CRM rollout and ride their adoption rails by building strong integrations between our server side products and these CRM’s.

• Some PHA’s are taking the approach of building a “super app” (apps that are targeted at tourists for example) and integrating Safe Paths mobile app capabilities into these super apps. Requires we can support downstream forks really well.

How SaaS changes adoption equation

If we provided SaaS versions of Path Check Products we could provide value to key segments in minutes vs weeks:

• Worldwide symptom reporting / heat map capabilities

• PHA’s can signup / onboard to use Safe Places and engage with patients/members of the public.

• Employers can signup / onboard to use employer CT tools and become “employee checkin locations”

• Venues can signup / onboard to use public spaces CT tools and become “visitor checkin locations”

So why not SaaS it up already?

The end game with SaaS must be defined prior to embarking down this path. There are significant considerations to address when going down this path.

• Revenue / subscription model to cover the costs of offering SaaS

• Significant increase in engineering capacity

• Significant addition of Tech / Dev Ops skill sets

• Serious investment in security architecture and engineering

• Compliance and auditing requirements

Open Source Ecosystem

Path Check Products are all Open Source and have been forked hundreds of times to date by a variety of interested projects. Within any Open Source effort, there is the concept of how downstream forks are supported within the ecosystem.

Ideally, the core Path Check OS projects can be forked, and combined with other projects, and still be able to receive critical updates from the primary / upstream project. Some amount of engagement with Path Check has been purely from PHA’s and their integrators who want to combine our mobile app capabilities with their own.

Benefits of Open Source for Path Check

Open Source has two primary benefits to the solution space we are targeting:

1. Open Source invites collaboration. Path Check is a collaborative organization (movement?) that practically begs you to “work with us”. We invite collaboration at an extreme level, it’s in our very early DNA and we would not be where we are without it.

2. Open Source as the name implies has nothing to hide. We are building solutions that will receive some of the most intense scrutiny of any software projects. We need our critics and external privacy hawks to look at our code and say “Yup, privacy is protected”.

Complications related to open source

While Open Source aligns well with the core of our values, there are some significant downside factors to consider as well:

1. How we secure data within the ecosystem becomes a greater challenge. Anyone can fork the code, stand up a simulator cluster across thousands of compute nodes and crack most encryption schemes we can build. This forces us to be more creative in our thinking in how we still protect privacy.

2. This next one is a doozy and one we need to think extremely carefully about: Downstream forks that start with our technology at the core, maybe even active partners can be morphed into abusive software from a privacy standpoint, intentionally or unintentionally.

Downstream fork privacy abuse potential

We are working with dozens of PHA’s and their integrators from all over the world. Some want to fork and combine our code with their existing projects. Some just want to add a few finishing touches to what we build, customized for their communities.

How do we know our privacy principles have been maintained?

How do we know (verify? certify?) that Path Check branded software won’t be used to violate the privacy of the public?

This open abuse vector begs for an independent auditing group which can certify on an initial and ongoing basis the status of any downstream fork. Especially, those with the Path Check brand and within our ecosystem.

Ecosystem controls

Today, the only control point in the ecosystem is via our maintenance of the healthcare_authorities.yaml file which requires multiple Path Check core contributors to update for a new HA to be added to the ecosystem. We currently require that Path Check legal sign off on this addition as well. We will likely require this process to be more robust in the future.

Product Roadmap

Product Roadmap content has been moved to a new subpage. Please update your bookmark.

Product Roadmap subpage: https://pathcheck.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AYBzBw