On Aug. 26, students will return to the UT campus to put some semblance of their lives back together amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The university is one of many across the country and the world that will rely on technology to help that process.
A number of companies have put out mobile applications to help with things such as symptom tracking and contact tracing, which is the process of figuring out who is at risk for developing COVID-19 based on the people they have interacted with — something normally done through interviewing.
Rather than adopt another company’s technology, UT decided to develop something in-house so the application would fit its specific needs, says Cameron Craddock, associate professor of diagnostic medicine at Dell Medical School and project lead.
The Protect Texas Together app, which is expected to be released Aug. 17, will allow people to track their symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources and — potentially, in the future — even assist in contact tracing.
Read about how students and Whole Communities–Whole Health helped to build it.