During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, global health researcher Anne Liu struggled to convince public health officials that apps and other technologies could help manage the spread of disease. To beat back the outbreak, officials had to locate every person an Ebola patient may have interacted with while they were infectious, in a process called contact tracing. Liu and her colleagues wanted investigators to use apps to compile information, rather than pen and paper. At the time, it was a hard sell.
