The Singapore Spacer
An alternative to lockdown which affords economically and socially critical people movements to continue at a volume commensurate with momentary disease spread risk
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The Singapore Spacer
A crowd location detection project
What is singapore spacer?
"An alternative to lockdownwhich affords economically and socially critical people movements to continue at a volume commensurate with momentary disease spread risk"
About the singapore spacer
The Singapore Spacer project brought a group of strangers together to work on an idea that can save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is quite common, knowing where people meet and disperse, is important in understanding how to limit community spread.
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We have developed a NUS Spacer, Wi-Fi based tool to enable decision makers to identify places on the NUS campus where people concentrations are high.
Like an eye in the sky, it allows leaders to make principled choices about what actions to take to reduce the likelihood of person to person COVID-19 transmission. It also can inform about the effectiveness of policies. For example, when lecture halls effectively shut as a result of the implementation of e-learning, are students amassing at some other location?
“The beauty of this system lies in its ability to accumulate useful information and to share it without further disrupting life on campus,”
“By using Wi-Fi signal strength received from thousands of mobile devices across campus, location information can be aggregated and mapped over time to inform about where and when people aggregate,”
The system was set up in record time as a result of close collaboration between the university-based design team and its support persons, IT professionals, NUS leadership and private companies including Aviation Virtual and ESRI Singapore who provided mapping and GIS support. A link to the NUS Spacer can be found here. (For login details, kindly write to mikechee15@gmail.com)
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We seek to enthuse various parties in Singapore to make anonymized cellular data available for the benefit of people concentration monitoring in the way we use Google Maps or Waze.
There have been several commentaries on this topic and the usefulness of the approach. For example, see here and here. A very graphic demonstration of the impact of such cellular sourced data is shown herein a partnership between US companies X Mode and Tektonix.
Germany, which is the country in Europe with the best record for low Covid-19 deaths is looking into using cell data to monitor social policies for people concentrations.
The data, which are anonymous and aggregated, make it possible to map concentrations and movements of persons in ‘hot zones’ where COVID-19 has taken hold.
That is less invasive than the approach taken by countries like China, and South Korea, which use smartphone location readings to trace the contacts of individuals who have tested positive or to enforce quarantine orders. An piece articulating this approach can be found here.
Similar initiatives are underfoot in Italy and Austria.
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Privacy: The NUS spacer reports only aggregate data. All personal info is hashed to remove personal details. Individuals are never tracked.
NUS CSC / CIRC-MR
Michael Chee
Thomas Yeo
Wong Chun Kit
Myan Myint Zu
Csaba Orban
Alyssa Ng
(Lydia Teo)
SMU
Rajesh Balan
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NUS SSHSPH
Alex Cook
Borame Sue Lee Dickens
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NUS IT Team
Tommy Hor
Ng Tiong Beng
Ooi Bok Koon
Nelson Wong
Kumar Sambhav
Gopinath Selvaraj
Mishra Vibhor Jugalprasad
Vamshidhar Gangu
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Aviation Virtual
Chong Chee Leong
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Esri Singapore
Lewis Goh
Abhijit Sarkar
Wang Ying Bo
Chan Lai Fong