guwahati home quarantined people in assam are now being bound by geofencing a virtual boundary up to 150 metres around their location to keep a realtime tab on their attempts to break out of the preventive isolationthe geofencing which is a locationbased service in which an app developed by nic assam using cellular data will trigger an alert when a mobile device exits the virtual boundary set up around its registered geographical locationthis covid suraksha app will be used to monitor people in home quarantine and they moment anyone goes beyond 150 metres boundary of the home quarantine location our health workers will get an immediate alert and can rush to the persons location and put him to quarantine assam health minister himanta biswa sarma said after launching the app in jorhat on saturdaythis to track home quarantined people is a new feature that has been added to covid suraksha app which is developed by national informatics centrenic assam and is already functioning to monitor the daily visits of the health workers to covid19 home quarantine cases and ensure that the person with such cases get medical checkup regularlybesides the module for health workers this app now one more module for citizens a person on reaching his quarantine location has to download the app and register himself with his mobile number as his id and he can create his own password additional district informatics officer arun chandra dutta saidapart from setting up the virtual geofence the app will send a reminder every one hour from 9 am to 5 pm to the quarantined person to upload his selfie which with the geo tag captured during registration will confirm whether the person is still inside the defined geofencean alert will be sent to the server the moment a person exits his defined geofence and health workers will be notified even if the person logs off from the app or switches off his mobile the same alert of exiting the geofence will be received in the server dutta saiddutta added that the third feature in the citizen module is the generation of a unique quick response or qr code the moment a person registers himself which will allow a health worker from his or her module to monitor the quarantined persons health statusthe state is now emphasizing on home quarantine as the key to preventing spread of covid19 in the community according to a revised quarantine sop in the state a person with travel history has to stay his first seven days in institutional quarantine facility or till his test results declare him as a negative and thereafter he would need to spend the remaining days of the 14 days period in home quarantinethe only drawback in the app is what if the person walks out of the geofence without carrying his mobile obviously he cant be tracked then but then people in the community are well aware of the importance of the completion of hoe quarantine and they will certainly stop