Drones, Phones, and Cones: The IoT Sensing Grid

As we grapple with the worldwide effects of COVID-19, it is evident that countries which have taken a digital approach to mitigate the spread are faring the best in "flattening the curve." Drones, Phones, and Cones (DPC) proposes to enable rapid decision support in combating the virus, by intuitively integrating and enhancing technology and practices for USAF. DPC will focus on the development of a distributed sensing grid, which will enable proactive preparedness and prevention of adverse effects due to population density while maintaining personal privacy as much as possible. Technical advancements made by the DPC effort will help inform policy for surveillance and data collection on individual subjects before and during pandemic responses in the future.    DPC will integrate drone-mounted and fixed cameras for surveillance, phones and IoT devices for sensor metadata, and cones, or configurable physical boundary models, to provide capabilities for the COVID-19 Focus Area Interests for this solicitation. DPC will enable stakeholders to identify trends and behaviors for pandemic preparedness and prevention. In an approach similar to the vision for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), DPC will enable a prepared distributed response to emerging public health crises, which necessary to adapt and are more likely to prevail.   DPC will introduce a sensing platform and technical backbone which can support a coordinated digital response to public health emergencies. This effort will focus on the integration of a pandemic emergency response platform, which includes data and metadata from widely available consumer commodity surveillance tools, such as drones, smart cameras, and smart city devices. DPC will support automation to enable near-real-time monitoring of public compliance with pandemic response guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other agencies. The software platform will support the rapid creation of virtual geographic boundaries for monitoring and notification.    It is our goal to enable simple self-reporting and monitoring software tools to mitigate the spread of illness due to physical proximity. The DPC effort will achieve these goals by integrating and adapting USAF AI platforms such as InfinityAI, FuelAI, and WingmanAI to rapidly introduce and update AI algorithms for monitoring and detection based upon the changes in affected populations and geographies. Finally, teaming features will enable analysis between Emergency Responders, Law Enforcement, State Government, the Federal Government, and allow feedback to make AI recommendations more accurate.