Indian-American student’s app helped Singapore develop its own Contact tracing technology

Team Udayavani, Jun 11, 2020, 5:31 PM IST

Indian- American student Rohan Suri’s app gave roadmap to Singapore’s contact tracing technology.

Singapore had been looking for technology to help curb the coronavirus and they drew inspiration from Rohan Suri’s 2014 U.S. high school project that won an international prize

Sources claim, in 2014, Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away.

But, during the Ebola epidemic in western Africa, Rohan and his schoolmate Claire Scoggins connected the dots between tracking apps and contact tracers to ask patients whom they may have spread viruses to.

After they developed a prototype called kTrace, they appealed to medical aid organizations and the U.S. government to bring it to the frontlines, which failed.

But, on Jan 2020, Rohan Suri received and email from Jason Bay, a Stanford alumni and senior director at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency as they were looking for a technology to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Rohan suri and his friends Nikhil Cheerla and Daniel Lee spent February and March volunteering on GovTech’s TraceTogether app.

They gave Singapore a roadmap by sharing kTrace’s code and providing advice in virtual meetings on stronger privacy protections.