Pisarasi is a solution developed and maintained by Kanijo Oy, a company formed for this purpose, to help suppress the COVID-19 epidemic. The original concept for the service was created during the Hack the Crisis Finland -hackathon during 2020 March 20.-22. We have gathered a team of experts from different fields who have come together to find a solution and a way for life to return normal.
Team:
Anssi Kolehmainen, developer
Arttu Ahava, lawyer
Jukka Pajarinen, MD, PhD, Adjunct professor in experimental orthopeadic surgery
Jukka-Pekka Venttola, system administration
Joonas Häll, UX design
Katariina Pirttijärvi, product owner / partners
Nino Hynninen, business manager
Suvi Sivulainen, communications
Special thanks:
Peer Review group
Kimberli Mäkäräinen, translator, English
Ria Böök, accessibility testing
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I want to participate
The purpose of Pisarasi is to offer everyone the opportunity to fight the coronavirus and to protect their loved ones. The main way of doing this is to log where you have been and keeping your own diary. We are still in the early stages and we would love to work with you. Together we can develop a functional network that makes it easier for healthcare professionals to do what they need to do.
Volunteer
test users: we need people who would like to test and comment on the service at different stages of the project, to ensure that Pisarasi works on different devices. Volunteer to participate in testing here.
Experts
We have gathered a team of experts from different fields who have come together to find a solution. Join us as a developer, healthcare expert, or in a different role. Please contact Katariina for more information.
Organizational collaboration
Our goal is to have all of Finland come together to work on tackling this epidemic so life can go back to normal. Together we can develop a functional network that makes it easier for healthcare professionals to do what they need to do. Please contact us, so we can start working on this together:
Katariina Pirttijärvi
Product owner / Partners and collaboration
Kanijo Oy
050 3054 713
katariina.pirttijarvi@pisarasi.fi
On a journey
8.4.2020, Katariina
shortened version of a social media post 8.4.2020
Last three weeks have been hectic in a very different way from my usual weeks. Firstly: I have not left home. Secondly: It all started as a weekend-long brain-teaser, participating in Hack the Crisis Finland hackathon during March 20.-22. It’s good to have something productive to do in the middle of all of this corona talk.
Now we are waiting for the registration papers to go through. We are about to launch the first version of our service.
It’s all rushing through my head. I also have a need to tell people about this, so here I am trying to explain a bit about what, why and how. This week has seen the discussion about contact tracing picking up. Good for us, we have been working on it for the last three weeks.
- Contact tracing is one of the most effective ways of stopping the spread of infectious diseases and getting the epidemic under control.
- In Finland, the infectious disease doctor of a health care district is responsible for contact tracing, quarantine decisions and the epidemic management.
- Contact tracing is mostly done through a personal interview process. Who really remembers exactly where they have been, with whom, for how long and which day it was?
Trendy solution is a mobile app. There are dozens being developed around the world. Some with a slightly different angle, but mostly all with the same basic idea. Using Bluetooth to log other Bluetooth devices, with the app installed, in the proximity of the device.
But… Not all of us have a smartphone. Not all of us can use these apps before tracing contacts is needed. And for the real benefit from the app, Minister of Transport and Communications Harakka told us this week, 60% of citizens need to be users.
That is a tough requirement globally and in Finland, especially when there are dozens of different solutions and we are not likely to see an app in market during the next few weeks. We started working at the problem from a different angle. How can we improve the current process and how we can make it as easy as possible for everyone involved?
The end result is Pisarasi, a digital diary of your movements and who you met during the last 14 days. You can use Google Timeline location history as the basis, or make your entries yourself. Using this as the baseline, you can make the whole interview process a lot faster. In the next versions, we are aiming to get more data sources from different services; being able to give your data to research; and finding contacts and exposures from the data we have available. The transmissions people can’t remember by themselves.
And well. It is a fact we are dealing with personal data and you need to be extremely careful with private information. That’s why we founded the company; so there is a clear juridical entity behind it and responsibility is clear. That is why we have not published anything yet (and we don’t count one static landing page) but have been focusing on how we should do this.
- Everything is based on the user giving us an informed consent to use their data for a specified purpose. Using the diary does not mean that your information can be given to healthcare. Your data is not automatically given to research. Everyone decides for themselves how involved they want to be and who can access their data.
- Application source code and related documentation is available for all those interested.
- In addition to our work group we have a peer review board doing quality assurance, going through changes and implementations before they are in production. Interested? Hit me up.
We’ll see how this goes.
I am nervous.