How Singapore’s Covid-19 contact tracing app drew inspiration from a US high school project

Two US students developed a prototype app called kTrace in 2014, at the height of the Ebola epidemic. They won a prize but found no backers

But Singapore’s GovTech agency found it and the students shared code and advice to speed up the development of the city state’s TraceTogether app

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Singapore’s Government Technology Agency received help from US students who developed a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app while in high school in 2014. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:00pm, 10 Jun 2020Updated: 3:06pm, 10 Jun 2020

Singapore kicked off a global rush to develop contact tracing apps for the novel coronavirus when the city state launched an apparently new system in March.

But the project actually drew inspiration from a 2014 US high school project that won an international prize but found no backers – until now.

It all started when 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. As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at the time, Suri and schoolmate Claire Scoggins connected the dots between tracking apps and contact tracers who ask patients whom they may have spread viruses to.

Rohan Suri, who developed a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app in 2014 and helped Singapore develop its pioneering TraceTogether system. Photo: Reuters

“I got really interested in basically automating a lot of these contact tracing efforts,” Suri said, noting a staff shortage in remote parts of Africa during the Ebola epidemic.

When Suri and Scoggins developed a prototype called kTrace, they appealed to medical aid organisations and the US government to bring it to the front lines. But they found no takers, even after winning third place for systems software at the 2015 International Science and Engineering Fair.

How Singapore’s Covid-19 contact tracing app drew inspiration from a US high school project

Two US students developed a prototype app called kTrace in 2014, at the height of the Ebola epidemic. They won a prize but found no backers But Singapore’s GovTech agency found it and the students shared code and advice to speed up the development of the city state’s TraceTogether app

Two US students developed a prototype app called kTrace in 2014, at the height of the Ebola epidemic. They won a prize but found no backers

But Singapore’s GovTech agency found it and the students shared code and advice to speed up the development of the city state’s TraceTogether app