LF Public Health was excited to host our first event, a half-day symposium dedicated to discussing some of the hard problems around implementing Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification (GAEN) apps. We gathered over 150 technologists, public health employees, and epidemiologists together to discuss how we could work together to make exposure notification succeed. 

Discussion was lively in both a plenary session and six breakout sessions. Notes from the event and videos will soon be available to the public on our GitHub

We reviewed the following topics for the symposium:

  • Diagnosis and authentication process
    • Handling different kinds of diagnoses, setting values for the transmission risk key, authenticating a diagnosis, and retracting/changing a diagnosis
  • App adoption, notification and user experience
    • Encouraging downloads and use; and the user experience of receiving an exposure notification, including the amount of information provided about that exposure
  • Measurements and signal attenuation
    • What should constitute a reportable exposure, including protocols for doing experiments with signal attenuation and measurement of exposure detection
  • Analytics, app accuracy, and disease progression in a community
    • Collecting analytics in a way that maintains privacy and allows us to better understand how accurate the app is, how the disease is progressing through the community, and other data important to researchers and epidemiologists
  • Roaming and federation
    • Sharing data across apps as users travel from one jurisdiction to another
  • Epidemiology for app builders
    • What developers need to know about how COVID-19 is transmitted and diagnosed

LFPH has already begun planning the next event – if you would like to be among the first to hear about it, please sign up for our mailing list below.