CoEpi: Community Epidemiology in Action

CoEpi was designed to protect individuals by bridging the gap between governmental public health actions and individual physical distancing efforts to prevent the spread of contagious illnesses. We believe it should be possible to combine modern smartphone technology and cloud computing to empower individuals and their personal networks to automatically and anonymously track their own contacts, and inform themselves and their friends and family about increased infection risks. 

While CoEpi and subequent exposure notification technologies demonstrated the feasibility of doing so, non-technical concerns around privacy and liability have prompted Apple and Google to place extremely stringent controls on exposure notification technology. These controls effectively prevent new exposure notification apps from being published in app stores unless they are the exclusive government-sponsored app for COVID-19 exposure notification within a country or state, and limit what even the government-sponsored apps can be used for.