One of the longer-term responses to the COVID-19 crisis will be the creation of a series of risk assessment tools that allow early warnings about the pending outbreak of a pandemic. Some of these tools will use health-related parameters, such as body temperature. Others will be based on people’s subjective self-assessments, including headache, muscle pain, difficulty with breathing, etc.

Equally important is to have risk assessment tools that rely on so-called non-reactive measures, i.e., data collected without directly engaging people. The objective of this Challenge is to identify such non-reactive measures that could signal the incoming pandemics before first clinical signs of it appear.

This is an Ideation Challenge, which has the following unique features:

  • There is a guaranteed award.  The award(s) will be paid to the best submission(s) as solely determined by the Seeker. The total payout will be up to $1,000, with at least one award being no smaller than $250.
  • The Solvers are not required to transfer exclusive intellectual property rights to the Seeker. Rather, by submitting a proposal, the Solver grants to the Seeker a royalty-free, perpetual, and non-exclusive license to use any information included in this proposal, including for promotional purposes.