Thank you, Madam Chair and esteemed members of the committee.
My name is Fay Arjomandi, and I also have Michel Burger, our CTO, on the call. I’m the co-founder, president and CEO of Mimik, a software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. For the past 10 years, Mimik has been pioneering the development of hybrid edge cloud computing, a technology that adds cloud capability to devices and apps to increase data privacy, reduce infrastructure costs and radically improve real-time interactions. It's eco-friendly and provides access to rural communities. Mimik’s technology is already empowering some innovative companies in health tech, fintech, AI, smart cars and smart cities.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to you as a fellow citizen, entrepreneur and technologist. Our platform is already being evaluated by large enterprises as part of a “going back to the workplace” solution and gaining traction from some of the indigenous communities, but we believe that with your support it can be used across Canada and globally for contact tracing.
COVID-19 has caused the loss of many Canadian lives and is impacting our economy and the livelihood of our citizens. It has attacked our way of life. Contact tracing is essential to implementing intelligent social distancing to send our citizens back to work safely and revive our economy. However, it evokes fears of surveillance, privacy abuse and stigmatization, and rightfully so, because solutions implemented by other countries are exactly that. One could say that such solutions will be another attack on our way of life.
Mimik’s platform can be used to implement effective contact tracing without compromising citizens’ privacy or patients’ anonymity, and at the same time avoid many pitfalls along the way.
There are three important aspects to an effective contact tracing implementation.