This is the team page for building a paper card + app based solution for coordinated vaccination with the help of PathCheck Foundation, MIT, IDEO and other partners.
The founding belief of the Trusted Pandemic Technologies is that when it comes to engaging citizens in a quest for the common good, especially public health, trust at all levels and among all participants is mandatory for success. So, the program builds on privacy-preserving systems for smartphone data, analytics, and machine learning.
Ecosystem:
Additional Details:
- Slides
- News and Analysis
- Papers
- Advisor Background
- Events
- FAQ
Submission Slides - Slides
Vaccines for All Conference at MIT - Pandemic.mit.edu
Slides - MIT, IDEO, PathCheck, CCI, VCI
Slides - PaperCreds
Privacy, equity, and efficiency in vaccine distribution - Boston Globe by Ramesh Raskar
'When can I schedule a COVID-19 vaccine appointment?' Why the government can't answer this simple question by Hana Schank and Ramesh Raskar
Paper Cards and Digital Codes Target Vaccination Chaos by Jeremy Hsu
MIT SafePaths Card (MiSaCa): Augmenting Paper Based Vaccination Cards with Printed Codes by Joseph Bae, Rohan Sukumaran, Sheshank Shankar, Saurish Srivastava, Rohan Iyer, Aryan Mahindra, Qamil Mirza, Maurizio Arseni, Anshuman Sharma, Saras Agrawal, Orna Mukhopadhyay, Colin Kang, Priyanshi Katiyar, Apurv Shekhar, Sifat Hasan, Krishnendu Dasgupta, Darshan Gandhi, Sethuraman TV, Parth Patwa, Ishaan Singh, Abhishek Singh, and Ramesh Raskar
Mobile Apps Prioritizating Privacy, Efficiency, and Equity: A Decentralized Approach to COVID-19 Vaccination Coordination by Joseph Bae, Rohan Sukumaran, Sheshank Shankar, Anshuman Sharma, Ishaan Singh, Haris Nazir, Colin Kang, Saurish Srivastava, Parth Patwa, Abhishek Singh, Priyanshi Katiyar, Vitor Pamplona, Ramesh Raskar
Vaccines for All: Challenges and Potential Solutions for Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution by Joseph Bae, Susan Blumenthal, Jagjit Dhaliwal, Shirley Bergin, Sanjay Sarma, and Ramesh Raskar
Verifiable Proof of Health using Public Key Cryptography by Abhishek Singh and Ramesh Raskar
Safepaths: Vaccine Diary Protocol and Decentralized Vaccine Coordination System using a Privacy Preserving User Centric Experience by Abhishek Singh, Ramesh Raskar, and Anna Lysyanskaya
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Exposure Notification App, now in 6 US states and territories by PathCheck Foundation
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First white paper on unintended consequences of digital solutions for contact tracing
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Awards for digital pandemic Work and research:
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Emergency Response for the Health Care System Innovation Challenge - Second Place
- Facebook COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge (jointly run by CMU, UMD, and Duke University) - Finalist
- NIST Too Close for Too Long (TC4TL) Challenge first round - 1st Place
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Talk at NIST Challenges for Digital Proximity Detection in Pandemics Event
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Host of convening events for COVID-19 digital solutions (https://pandemic.mit.edu) and (https://responsibledata.ai/events/trust)
- Conference on "Vaccines for All" at MIT [Jan 14, Dec 11]
- Trusted Pandemic Tech at MIT https://pandemic.mit.edu
No. Systems such as VAMS/VAERS/V-Safe/IIS/IZ. are important in wide ranging COVID-19 vaccination efforts. Our proposed app would provide an alternative method for vaccination that is privacy-sparing, efficient, and equitable while serving as a supplemental source of vaccine monitoring information.
Vaccine diary, second-dose and health status alert, and informational features of our proposed app would be independent of the existing systems. The input of vaccination information upon administration of a vaccine and side effect/efficacy reports are two areas with potential for integration with government systems. To verify and record the vaccine administration, vaccination clinics or governments would need to provide signed QR codes that can be printed / copied by pharmacies or by users. This QR code would have information regarding the lot, manufacturer, and dosing of a vaccine which can then be verified by others with the appropriate digital key.
For interoperability of symptom/side effect reports, state or federal systems will need to allow the pseudorandom identifier associated with a user to be used for data identification purposes rather than PII such as name, address, etc. This is already part of the PPRL (privacy preserving record linkage) protocol for VAMS and IIS.
Doctors and public health officials can contact users regarding pertinent information about their specific vaccine lot and other important details via app-mediated push notifications and contextual alerts. This is similar to ‘recalls’ in auto-parts, food safety, toys, etc.
The emphasis is on privacy, equity and efficiency. Significant chunks of the population still exhibit vaccine hesitancy and many may be unwilling to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. This app aims to remove potential barriers to vaccination by protecting data privacy, creating a convenient, streamlined user experience, and providing multiple vaccine-related functionalities in one platform. We also believe that decentralized data can be used for a broad range of public health research.
This app does support vaccine verification while also including modules surrounding eligibility confirmation, dose scheduling and reminders, health assessments and symptom reporting, and providing users with push-notifications and contextual alerts.
We have also proposed state-produced physical vaccine cards that can be used for many of the functions of our app solution. This enables a privacy-focused solution for vaccination. Please see a thorough explanation in section 6.
The app is developed using open-source code and open standards. Similar to the exposure notification apps, the app does not request any PII.
PII including name, date of birth, and contact information is primarily used for user identification, contact, and record-keeping. Health information is stored to determine eligibility for vaccination based upon exclusion criteria and to track the interactions between various medical conditions and vaccination. Other personal information might be used for aggregate analysis and statistical purposes regarding equitable distribution among diverse populations. Our app-based approach addresses each of these functions without the use of PII.
Identification of an individual for record-keeping is performed using a pseudorandom identification number rather than name or date of birth. Previous health information can be inputted into the app for exclusion determination where it is not stored. As soon as the app determines eligibility for vaccination information shared in these questions will be deleted. Symptom and adverse event reporting can be performed either anonymously or with personal information that might lend insight into vaccine and medical condition interactions. All demographic information can be anonymized and aggregated for reporting.
We expect users seeking a privacy oriented approach to vaccination to use a physical card containing a digitally-signed QR code from the government.
PathCheck is a nonprofit organization originating in Dr. Ramesh Raskar’s lab at MIT. PathChck is the world’s largest open source, open standards nonprofit organization for COVID-19 and innovates across a broad array of problems stemming from the pandemic. PathCheck was the first organization to launch an EN app for contact tracing in COVID-19, successfully partnering with 6 US states and territories.
MIT SafePaths is a set of standards protocols and algorithms and open-source tools. The project on vaccination protocols is led by Ramesh Raskar at Trusted Pandemic Tech and MIT Media Lab, Sanjay Sarma at MIT Auto-ID Lab and Anna Lysyanskaya at Brown University.