Consumer Intelligence

AI Pandemic Mitigation: Understanding COVID-19 Spread with Mobilewalla Data

Many unknowns still remain in the fight against COVID-19, but it is clear that staying connected can help us in more ways than one. Thanks to anonymized location data and predictive models, the same devices that keep us connected to communities and colleagues can also help generate insights about the path of the virus and influence the allocation of medical resources.

Contact Tracing with Data

With the absence of prevention and cure methods, the pandemic is primarily being managed through mitigation. One important aspect of mitigating virus spread has been through “contact tracing” which involves tracking the movements of infected people to identify and alert who came in contact with them.

Traditionally, contact tracing is a time-consuming process that relies on interviews, memory, and other tasks that are prone to human error. The unprecedented speed and scale of this pandemic makes these manual methods nearly impossible, not to mention less effective.

Data and AI technologies are being used in new ways to battle COVID-19, particularly in countries that adopt a scientific approach to public health. Data scientists are leveraging third-party data to create machine learning models to predict infection rates, which in turn can inform decisions about resource needs and allocation.

AI can be used to power two key tasks of pandemic mitigation:

  • Infection tracking
  • Infection spread prediction


If done correctly, AI can help provide three foundational pieces of information which are crucial to tracking and predicting the spread:

  • Measuring social isolation by observing individual mobility
  • Identifying clusters of more than a certain number of individuals and identifying the corresponding locations
  • Risk assessment of individuals and locations, at scale, by understanding the movement of infected individuals

At Mobilewalla, we are working with major healthcare companies, hospital systems and government entities, who all play significant roles in pandemic management. Using sophisticated AI and machine learning techniques, we create the data attributes and features that data scientists can leverage in their predictive models.

Mobilewalla is providing three types of related data for COVID-19 mitigation efforts: 

  • Individual mobility, which is an indication of the distance someone travels on a regular basis,
  • Cluster identification which identifies gatherings of more than a certain number of devices (typically 10-20) at a single location, and
  • Building a contagion graph through individual device data, the radius of gyration and cluster identification.

To learn more about how Mobilewalla is helping organizations map the virus spread, check out the Technology Brief: Building a Contagion Graph to Identify the High-Risk Areas and People During Viral Infection Spread.
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About Mobilewalla

Mobilewalla is a leader in consumer intelligence solutions, combining the industry’s most robust data set with cutting edge data science and deep artificial intelligence expertise to help organizations better understand, model, and predict audience behavior. Connect with our data experts to learn how you can leverage our data for more predictive modeling.

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Mobilewalla

Mobilewalla is a global leader in consumer intelligence solutions, leveraging the industry’s most robust consumer data set and deep artificial intelligence expertise. Our refined consumer insights provide enterprises with unparalleled access to the digital and offline behavior patterns of customers, prospects, and competition.

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