Microsoft engineer adapts fan-tracking app for COVID-19 use

A Microsoft engineer who designed an app to track rth Dakota State University football fans on ir annual trek to Texas for national championship has taken that concept and applied it to contact tracing for coronavirus.

Care19 app is meant to help reduce spre of COVID-19 by retracing steps of people who test positive for virus, in order to find ors who may have h contact with sick person and also collect data to help with modeling, Gov. Doug Burgum said Tuesday during his daily briefing.

“This is a way that every rth Dakotan can save lives by downloing Care19 app," Burgum said.

Tim Brookins, 55, a principal software engineer at Fargo’s Microsoft campus and CEO of sports app software company ProudCrowd, came up with popular Bison Tracker app a half-dozen years ago. Last year, more than 15,000 football fans from various states and provinces accessed app en route to rth Dakota State's eighth national title in nine years.

Burgum, a former executive at Microsoft, sparked idea at a COVID-19 brainstorming session with Microsoft engineers when he introduced Brookins as creator of Bison Tracker.

“My staff just lit up and said, ‘That’s what we need,’” Brookins told Associated Press.

app is free and optional. It has been approved for Apple users and should be available for Android devices in about a week, Burgum said.

Like Bison Tracker, Care19 is anymous and doesn’t ask for names, phone numbers or log-in information. Once app is downloed, individuals will be given a random ID number and it will cache individual’s locations throughout day. Users are n encourd to categorize ir movement into different groups such as work or grocery.

State health officials have so far been relying on extensive interviews with people who are sick, or in some cases incapacitated. app should show all places user has been for at least 15 minutes, time it takes to put people at high risk for contracting virus if re’s face-to-face contact, according to federal health officials.

app can also assign a risk score to users depending how y move and interact across state, Brookins said. If a person stays home for most part with maybe an occasional trip to grocery store or gas station, he or she would be assigned to a low-risk pool. If people to work for eight hours, in many cases for jobs deemed essential, that would likely place m in high-risk bucket.

information should be valuable for state officials in ir modeling and planning, said Brookins, ting that Burgum is a “very data-driven man.” One reason goverr has t issued a stay-at-home order is because he said he hasn't found statistics showing that it makes a difference.

“Everybody wants to kw, especially our president, when we can go back to rmal, when we can release stay-at-homes, things like that,” Brookins said. “Well, kwing how people are moving will inform that and we’ll have much better projections.”