As millions of people around the world self-quarantine to fight the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, there are a lot of healthcare and meditation apps that seem to task them with ways to keep fit and beat the stress that comes from being locked inside their homes.
Whilst most of these apps teach you how to exercise or meditate and burn calories while you isolate yourself from the rest of the world, there's one app that seems to "gamify" the act of social distancing by allowing you to compete with your family and friends to see who has spent the most time staying put indoors.
Snapchat-owned app develops stay-at-home leaderboard
Snapchat owned location-sharing app Zenly has launched a new 'Stay-at-Home' challenge that shows a leaderboard comparing who among you and your friends have spent the most percentage of time in their homes in the last three days.
The app also allows you to share stickers of your scoreboard on social media networks such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and others.
Encouraging social-distancing
Zenly and other location-sharing apps typically encourage users to venture outside and explore the world and share their locations for things like meeting up with friends. But the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak made these apps suddenly lose their purpose due to the widespread order for people to self-quarantine and avoid mingling with people outside their homes as a precautionary measure to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus contagion.
By building a game around social-distancing, which has become the need of the hour, Zenly has made it fun and enjoyable by incentivizing the act by letting you show how you and your friends are abiding by the rules by not going outside, or visiting friends with its stay-at-home leaderboard.
How Zenly's stay-at-home leaderboard works
Zenly's stay-at-home 3-Day leaderboard ranks five of the friends who are staying at home the most in the last three days. Whoever stays home the most, takes the No.1 spot in the top five.
To get the stay-at-home leadboard to show up, you will need to have the Zenly app installed on your phone and add at least one friend that has a "home" on Zenly. But it typically takes a few days to get a "home" in the app after you join and give access to your location, since the app takes time to figure out where out where your home is located based on your daily location patterns.
The apo also shows for other cards alongside the leaderboard– one that shows who much time of the day you've spent at home and another showing a streak of how long you've stayed at home.
More than just a game
Apart from the stay-at-home leaderboard, Zenly is also offering tips on how to contain coronavirus and a link to the WHO's coronavirus advisory. And since the app is owned by Snap Inc, the company that owns Snapchat, you can also attach an augmented reality (AR) filter of a mask to your profile picture to show just how seriously you are taking social distancing.
On a serious note, the app also shows a map overlay that shows the number of coronavirus cases in a state or country. Zenly's coronavirus lens for its map let's you look around the world and see the number of confirmed cases and recoveries in each country or state by just tapping on an emoji.
The app says that it updates the data three times a day based on the The John Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. It also shows information from the WHO, the Netherlands-based BNO News, and China's DXY among others.
The apps efforts are really worth appreciating and could really help make a difference in convincing people around the world to do their bit in fighting this worldwide public health emergency. Meanwhile, Zenly's co-founder and CEO Antoine Martin called upon developers to build a gamifirf quarantine app as the inspiration. Now, who would have thought staying at home would be rewarded and encouraged!
