Designing an Integrative, Comprehensive, Sustainable and Secure Pandemic Data Donation Project in Germany

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Brockmann
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 492631324

The unfolding of the Covid-19 pandemic during the past 14 months on a global scale showed that a successful mitigation of the disease and containment on the SARS-CoV-2-virus requires (i) swift, (ii) early, and (iii) regionally resolved action by policy makers, public health bodies, and institutions. In order improve, swiftness, early response and regionally resolved assessments the Robert Koch-Institute launched two digital mass-data projects, that were designed to advance pandemic surveillance, situation assessment and provide quantitative computational models with high-resolution data. The “Covid-19 mobility project” uses anonymized and aggregated commercial mobility data, derived from over 50 million individual cell phone users. The mobility project has been instrumental as a tool for measuring behavior changes in the population with high spatial resolution for instance in response to lockdown measures. The Corona-Data-Donation Project (Datenspende-App) was launched in April 2020. In this project more than 500.000 donors provide their data on daily heart-rate, step counts and sleep pattern that is captured by their wearable devices, smart watches or fitness trackers. Based on individual time-series of these data streams and mathematical algorithms the likelihood of a user having developed fever is computed, a valuable piece of information as fever is one of the symptoms of covid-19 disease. The community of donors remains stable at half a million individuals and is the only data donation project of this volume worldwide. A new version of the donation project will be released soon (Datenspende 3.0) that permits direct interaction with individual donors. This way real-time surveys can be conducted, e.g. on the state of health, history, past covid infection or psychological aspects. This project aims to integrate the Covid-19 Mobility and Data Donation projects by integrating a donation element of individual, anonymized mobility profiles as part of a donation stream.The goal is the development of the conceptual, technological, and computational infrastructure for a sustainable pandemic data donation project that integrates the components of surveillance of vital signals, individual mobility patterns, and contact dynamics as well as information from social and psychological surveys under one umbrella. The project thus integrates, individual health monitoring, mobility as well as individual survey aspects of pandemic surveillance in a single, real-time monitoring system based on a voluntary datadonation principle.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Denmark, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Sune Lehmann, Ph.D.; Professor Stephen Steinhubl; Professor Eric Topol