In order to tackle COVID-19 outbreak, most of the countries have adopted severe measures and restrictions advocating social distancing and population confinement. Although containment is the most effective measure to counteract the virus; however, after the first month of a strong commitment to confinement, people start getting bored and frustrated at home.
On one hand, this is due to the fact that daily statistics about newly infected cases continue its escalating trend, and people cannot see the direct impact of their staying home. On the other hand, there is no clear view on when this pandemic will end and people will return to normal life. Even with the expected alleviation of some confinement restrictions in the future, staying home will remain a viable option to mitigate the pandemic.
Moreover, people at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19, such as older adults or persons having severe underlying medical conditions are highly recommended to stay home. People just returning from travel are also recommended to comply to confinement and stay home.
While COVID-19 may last for long, how to motivate people to prolong their stay home commitment is the issue we wish to solve in this proposal. One way to achieve this goal is to allow people to measure the value of their stay at home by first, accounting for how long they are committing to confinement and then reward them accordingly.
In this project, we propose to build a national transparent rewarding system for people proving to accumulate long stay-at-home times. The main challenge is how to make an attractive system for people to provide their proof of staying at home for as long as the pandemic is still alive. Moreover, the rewarding system needs to be transparent and incentivizes people to join and participate. For this purpose, in this project, we aim to develop “Mokafaa” a blockchain-based transparent rewarding platform where users, through an interactive mobile app provide their proof of staying at home that will be managed by a smart-contract deployed in a blockchain network.
The logic of the rewarding system, including start and end date of the contest, contest periodicity (e.g. every 14 days), category (recent travelers, older people, workers) the reward, etc. will be defined in a smart-contract and deployed in a public but free blockchain network. The mobile app interacts with the blockchain network and continuously or at random times provides proof of staying home. The mobile app needs to continuously monitors the position of the device and provides proof of staying home whenever the user interacts with the device to make sure that both the user and the device are at the same location at home (confinement area).
Basically, during initialization, the mobile app will define a logical geofencing (confinement) area by collecting information about neighboring WiFi APs and Cell towers and stores them locally. After that, the app continuously monitors signals coming from neighboring APs and cellular towers and compare them with the initially stored information. According to a similarity index, the app can detect if the device is still within the geofencing area or left it.
