With FeverIQ, individuals report daily whether they are feeling well or have any COVID-related symptoms, and see a map of what other people have shared
Enya has launched first privacy-preserving symptom mapping solution to help scientists fight Covid-19 and businesses re-open safely. (Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Enya, a privacy and data security company, today announces the launch of FeverIQ, the first COVID-19 symptom map that uses privacy-preserving analytics to help scientists better understand which symptoms are most indicative of the disease, and provide early warnings of potential infection clusters at the neighborhood level to help businesses and policy makers safely restart the economy.
With FeverIQ, individuals report daily whether they are feeling well or have any COVID-related symptoms, and see a map of what other people have shared. They can also learn about their personal risk of contracting the disease and what they can do to mitigate the risk. FeverIQ downsamples location data to 1km resolution to protect privacy. Businesses and policy makers can monitor the potential development of any clusters of symptoms around different neighborhoods to adjust the pace and areas of re-opening to ensure the safety of their community.
Traditionally, healthcare and biomedical research involve transmitting sensitive data to medical professionals and scientists, risking possible exposure in a data breach. In contrast, FeverIQ uses the secure multiparty computation (SMC) capability of the Enya SDK to compute the results that are relevant to researchers instead of storing the symptoms directly, balancing insight and privacy. In addition, FeverIQ uses SMC to calculate the personal risk level without ever directly seeing or storing user inputs. Enya has open sourced the code behind FeverIQ, which is already being incorporated into mobile applications with broad usage around the world.
“There is immense pressure to sacrifice personal privacy for the sake of public good, but FeverIQ demonstrates there is a better way,” said Alan Chiu, CEO of Enya. “With secure multiparty computation, we all can help scientists fight COVID and businesses re-open safely, while still keeping our privacy intact,” said Jan Liphardt, Chief Technologist of Enya.
Source: Company Press Release