A Platform for Citizen Cooperation during the COVID-19 Pandemic in RN, Brazil

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic challenged smart cities to encourage citizens towards the social distance, as well as to optimize health and policing resources allocation. Mobile apps have played an unprecedented role during this pandemic to enable citizens to participate and interact with social issues while raising concerns about privacy and surveillance. In a partnership of the Natal smart city initiative of the university and the public ministry, we deployed the “Tô de Olho” (TdO) platform for integrating different sectors of society against coronavirus spreading in the state of RN, Brazil. In less than four months, TdO reached more than 20,000 users with several user roles, functionalities and a strictly defined privacy policy. Location data allows TdO to notify users when they have possible suspicious contact with an infected person or have gone through virus hot zones. The platform also helps city health officials to select people for infectious testing, according to user information on symptoms, comorbid diseases, contact with infected people, risk status and QR health code. Our integration with private institutions enables employers to know which employees have tested positive to protect work environments. We discuss the partnerships involved with TdO’s deployment and compare our context with related apps around the world, suggesting that public scrutiny, government investments and integration with active applications in the city are essential to achieving massive use. Further, we evaluate the feedback of active users (N=175), analyzing the positive points and advising improvements for future work on participatory applications during an epidemic.