Case Study: Camber Systems Social Distancing Reporter

Camber Systems, in partnership with epidemiologists within the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network, developed a tool that uses mobility data to visualize how populations adhere to social distancing restrictions over time.

Coforma (formerly &Partners) provided front-end development and design to help Camber Systems present the data in a visually appealing way that’s accessible to different stakeholders, such as city health officials, scientists, and journalists, who need reliable data that protects privacy in order to inform critical logistics decisions, infrastructure and resource allocations, and healthcare policies. This post details the background, methods, and outcome of our work together to deliver an updated tool in just three weeks.

“Coforma has been a joy to work with. They worked with us on a COVID-19-related project, understood its importance, grasped its complexity, and quickly implemented thoughtful strategies and solutions with us. They truly were partners with us. Their skills in technology, design and messaging were vital to our success.”
— Navin Vembar, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Camber Systems

Background

COVID-19 created crises on every scale, and problems would only compound over time if policymakers waited for a vaccine to relieve them. But there’s an empirical way to minimize damage and maximize recovery.

Data can help by:

• Informing decisions about where to put resources
• Indicating where to increase social distancing measures
• Revealing where it’s safe to to reopen businesses and/or schools
• Tracking the efficacy of new policies

The data analytics industry at large saw an immediate opportunity to use location data for tracing infections and disease surveillance. Camber Systems knew that contact tracing alone isn’t enough to understand how a pandemic is evolving.

Camber Systems sought to contextualize location data in a unique way, by tracking not just how far people travel but also how predictable their movement is. For example, if people travel long distances every day, they may be committed to a long commute as an essential worker. However, if people travel variable distances to many different places, they’re more likely to be socializing.

Coforma knew this information could start saving lives immediately. So, we worked fast in a collaborative production team to build a web application that would present the data in an accessible and usable way for policymakers, data scientists, epidemiologists, and researchers alike.

Methodology

Coforma used a lean, iterative approach to design, develop, and deploy an updated design system as quickly as possible. The design process began and ended with an audit of the existing design looking for observable gaps and opportunities. This foundation allowed Coforma to identify four key goals for the final updated product: it would be accessible, usable, informative, and unique.

The first major overhaul of the tool was delivered on the second day of the project, one week ahead of schedule. Creating an initial system laid the groundwork for the next few weeks, over which the visual design grew, transformed, and was continuously cleaned up. As new data was coming in, we updated and improved the ongoing analytics, information hierarchy, and interaction design to accommodate an expanding tool.

Daily releases of new code culminated in major functionality being released at the end of every week. For each deliverable, our team measured its impact in meeting its four goals and looked for new places to improve upon the baseline. The Social Distancing Reporter evolved from one line graph to two models of shifting daily trends, expanded to include visualizations, and gave breathing room to very dense data sets.

Human-Centered Design

None of this data is useful without context, but it’s important to advocate for the right context. There could’ve been more metrics added to the Social Distancing Reporter, more suggestions for the story it tells, but Camber Systems didn’t want the tool to make it easy to find false connections between data they’re still learning to interpret.

Developing a response to COVID-19 isn’t straightforward, and oversimplification could become disastrous misdirection. While we worked with Camber Systems to present data clearly with well-defined metrics, it was important to leave some gaps for the user to fill in, such as interpretations of rural versus urban mobility and other regional consideration.

The Social Distancing Reporter is meant to support local knowledge, not substitute it. It can’t make a decision or find causal relationships with other metrics, but it makes the user’s situation less uncertain.

Data Privacy

One of the design goals was maintaining peoples’ privacy. The intention of the Social Distancing Reporter is to facilitate the support of communities, not make them more vulnerable.

While Coforma used Vue.js, SASS, JS, and HTML for front-end development, and Plotly.js to create data visualizations as a component of the front-end coding, Camber Systems exclusively managed a separate technology stack. Their stack generates the anonymized data passed along to the web application.

Security was also built into the data processing method. Following the advice of epidemiologists, Camber Systems took care to refine, anonymize, standardize, and limit access to the data they had on a fine scale. They introduced noise and truncated the data set to further prevent re-identification, ensuring a crisis couldn’t be used as an excuse to put individuals or their communities at risk.

Outcomes

The final Social Distancing Reporter tool both visualizes the mobility data collected by Camber Systems and serves as a flexible design framework allowing for rapid updates to that information. Every day, mobility data is added to the system to give a current picture of the country’s direction.

As a result of our collaboration, Camber Systems provides policymakers and researchers across the country with up-to-date data on the efficacy of local public health actions. Minnesota and other state governments have benefitted from Camber Systems Social Distancing Reporter to help solve some of the toughest questions surrounding responses to COVID-19.

The ethical considerations of the Social Distancing Reporter help set a standard for the ways data should be collected and handled — and not just in the midst of an emergency. Camber Systems ensures individuals cannot be identified out of aggregated data, working to create a secure and sustainable framework for the future of data processing.

This post was updated 9/27/2020 to reflect the company’s name change.