Social Distancing App: graduate student response to covid crisis

Pembroke student Alex Barnes (DPhil International Development, 2017) is part of the small team who have developed Keep Your Distance, a platform that provides real-time data to users in order to help them comply with government social distancing guidelines.

Keep Your Distance is a free mobile app that provides real-time data on how crowded essential locations are, such as supermarkets and pharmacies.  In providing this information, the platform allows people to choose less busy times and less crowded stores to visit, adhere to governmental social distancing guidelines, and ultimately save lives.

Discussing the goals of the platform, Alex commented: “We wanted to use our skills and knowledge to help people stay safe during the COVID-19 outbreak, and we came up with 'Keep Your Distance'. We think it will be extremely useful for people who need to travel to essential services, but also want to practice social distancing to protect themselves and the population. We'd love for people to sign up to our mailing list to get early access and user testing, so that we can release a great service as quickly as possible".