Despite filling out their daily symptom monitoring survey on time, some students have still had their DukeCards deactivated due to technological issues the Office of Information Technology is working to fix.
Duke’s symptom tracking app, known as SymMon, requires students to answer a series of questions regarding their health—for example, if they have “had an exposure to a person with COVID illness” or “feel feverish”—every morning. Duke has used the app to isolate those with COVID-19 symptoms and test them to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Charley Kneifel, senior technical director at OIT and a member of the SymMon app team, told The Chronicle in a statement that “a total of 17,500 students, faculty and staff used SymMon in September of 2020, which resulted in a total of 290,000 health checks.”
If a student does not complete the monitoring by 2 p.m., their DukeCard access is revoked, and they are unable to buy food or enter buildings. If a student fills out SymMon after their access is revoked, it will be reinstated.
Despite this, some students have recently encountered issues with SymMon’s connection to their DukeCard, receiving an alert that their card access has been revoked due to a failure to complete symptom reporting even after completing the survey by 2 p.m.
One student whose SymMon stopped functioning, sophomore Rachel Enggasser, said the technical issues were “annoying” because they weren't her fault and interrupted her focus on the day.
“The other day, I filled out my SymMon at 9:45 a.m. before I left to get my pool testing done,” Enggasser said. “When I came back, I was getting notifications that I hadn’t completed it, so I kept completing it throughout the day. I completed it about four times before 2 p.m., but they still turned off my DukeCard.”
Kneifel wrote that SymMon typically addresses “less than a dozen student issues a day” and that the issues are “often easily fixed within minutes.” He cited multiple reasons why the SymMon app could cease to function.
“In some cases we see that a student’s app goes offline and the symptom monitoring doesn’t complete until later, when a student is back online,” he wrote. “In other cases we have seen, the app is not updating the central systems, [or] the web servers that support the SymMon app, Student Health REDCap, and DukeCard systems among others. We have found it is sometimes necessary to restart or reinstall the app.”
Kneifel wrote that the team received symptom-monitoring support questions from 136 people in the last two weeks of September.
Enggasser said she missed a meeting because she was trying to call different numbers to fix the problem. After going through about ten numbers, she said she was told to “clear the data” on her app because the app “simply was not registering that [her] account activity was working.” This solution, however, did not last.
“Since then, it’s happened many more times,” Enggasser said. “Yesterday I spent 15 minutes trying to get my card to register the fact that I had filled out my symptom monitoring by uninstalling the app and clearing the data. It took me like 15 straight minutes of trying the same options, and other people have had the same issues.”
Kneifel wrote that when students call the team about a problem regarding the app, the team’s first response is to “apologize and work to fix it for them.” There are specific circumstances that they hear about more often than others.
“It may happen that they report symptoms at 2:01 and get a text at 2:10 saying their DukeCard has been deactivated,” Kneifel wrote. “When that happens the DukeCard has already been reactivated and the issue is due to the time necessary to process the SMS notices.”
In response to concerns, OIT has been working to improve the app’s functionality and ensure their servers can efficiently determine when a student’s monitoring has been completed.
Kneifel revealed the measures the team was taking to update the app so that technological issues like Enggasser’s would stop occurring in the future.
“OIT, in partnership with the Duke Institute for Health Innovation, releases updates every one to two weeks to provide enhancements and address reported issues,” he wrote. “We are about to release v1.10 of the app, the 10th release, which will help fix the problem of DukeCards getting deactivated even though symptom monitoring had been completed before 2 p.m.”
Version 1.9 of the app was released Sept. 27.
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Alison Korn is a Pratt senior and enterprise advisor of The Chronicle's 119th volume.