Our idea for this application is to motivate people to stay in their homes during quarantine to help limit the spread of COVID-19 by utilizing the user’s location and showing their impact in the process. In addition, we hope to include features with top news stories, new information on COVID-19, and ways you can help during this crisis. The application will ultimately help communities unite in this pandemic and serve as a meeting ground for everyone to share their experiences and updates during quarantine. Our app will allow users to inform their network if they have tested positive, negative, or successfully recovered from COVID-19.
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About Us
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Our group consists of three University of Texas AET majors: Cole Fortson, Stephanie Wilhite, and Shaylon Elmore. We are students in a Design Studio class at the university under the instruction and mentorship of Kyle Evans, Michael Baker, and J.E. Johnson, and have been working on a project we’ve titled Quaranteams since going online March 30th due to the outbreak of COVID-19. In lieu of these events, together, our group altered its path to create a conceptualized mobile application for keeping people at home during quarantine. We have been working on this project for about six weeks now and have discovered new ways of learning, adapting and collaborating along the way.
As everyone was quarantined, creating an app that encouraged us to remain quarantined and to have a purpose for quarantining became important to us. We felt that friendly monitoring could encourage people to stay inside. If we could be kept accountable by our friends and also keep them accountable, it could help reduce the spread of the virus. We felt that it was important to create something that could help be a reminder to everyone how we are important and can do our part in the current situation.
Our vision for the future of Quaranteams is that it can be used as an open guide or idea for an app that can be funded or taken up by another company. Ultimately we hope that it can gain awareness of ways we can be social and held accountable during quarantine or to find meaning in it. We hope that it can be a way people are reminded of how Coronavirus or any other situations like this affect the community and how everyone can play a role.
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F.A.Q.s
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How do we navigate around the easy cheat in leaving your phone at home?
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Quaranteams is an app that holds people accountable to their friends and selves on the app. It is meant for people who want to use the app as a reminder to do better and think about their community and those most vulnerable. It is a reminder to users why they are quarantining and possibly encourage people to think if it is absolutely necessary to leave their houses. If users actively would go through the effort to leave their phones at their houses when they break quarantine, why use the app to begin with? It is not an app for schools, the government, or companies to use to try to force people to quarantine. It is for friends and self accountability, while focusing user efforts towards charity.
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What if I want to go to the grocery store?
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To ensure our app functions as well as possible, once your location of quarantine is set, you cannot leave it or you expose yourself and therefore break your quarantine. However, the app will allow you to explain yourself as to why you’ve broken quarantine to your community.
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What about those who are being forced to go to work and wouldn’t earn any points for quarantining?
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We are not capable of changing how companies operate and treat their workers directly and how this may affect those workers. But the app can still be used by people in that situation. They can be the ones who keep their friends accountable and encourage them to do what they are not able. This also applies to essential workers. The app also gives the latest news and tips to stay safe while out of quarantine which can still be useful to everyone in any situation. In the future the app may implement a feature for users to declare themselves as an essential worker so that they do not spam notifications of breaking quarantine everyday nor give other people information about their usual routine (and out of the house) constantly and lead to potential unsafe situations. They would still be breaking the streak though.
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How is our app different from contact tracing?
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Quaranteams does not track the locations of other phones or collect that data. So in turn it cannot track the contact users may have had with others or those infected. It only tracks the user’s personal action in leaving their home location and will notify their friends, allowing for an explanation. We want to keep the sharing of information within people you allow and not to anyone else.
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