Aiisma: An app that rewards users in exchange for sharing Covid-19 data

As the government is pushing hard to track down the rising number of Covid-19 cases, data marketplace Aiisma, where users can share their user data in exchange for rewards, has enabled a feature on its app for contact tracing and symptom mapping.

AiiHealth, its health-mapping feature, allows users to voluntarily and anonymously share their health data in turn helping authorities to take proactive measures if in case there are any abnormalities in the data pool. The startup also has a trigger function to send anonymous alerts to any user who might come in contact with a positive case.  

"Our data figures show nearly one-fourth of our users were regularly moving around the 500-metre radius during peak of the lockdown," said Ankit Chaudhari, founder and CEO, Aiisma. "So these are figures shared by users voluntarily and they are getting rewarded for this information."

 

The Gurugram-based marketplace extracts user's behavioural data from social media and fitness apps and aggregates all the information under a single app. The users get rewarded once they complete surveys or view advertisements presented to them based on their preferences and interests. They collect internal reward tokens called Aiis that can be exchanged for Amazon gift coupons at this time. Aiisma also plans to bring an option where tokens can be directly exchanged for cash.

Aiisma has also recently launched the contract tracing and rewards feature for non-smart phones based on Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes targeting rural population. Here, the telecom operator becomes effective in sharing the subscriber's geo-location through their telecom towers. "We are talking to a couple of telecom operators for the sharing of geo-location through triangulation and one of the largest equipment makers in the country to pre-install our app on their phones," Chaudhari added.

 

Aiisma said, it was not competing with Arogya Setu as contract tracing is just a feature of the app. "We can, in fact, share crucial data and insights about hotspots or violations to the government if they provide the application programming interface (APIs) of Aarogya Setu."

The startup was founded in 2018 by Ankit Chaudhari and Nicholas Böhnlein. It has its corporate headquarters in Las Vegas in the US though operations headquarters is located in India.