Coronavirus: ‘Dont touch your face’ website shouts at you when you touch your face

As the coronavirus fear grips the world, people are taking various precautionary measures to prevent the disease, including not touching their face.

A new website -- Donottouchyourface.com offers help to people who cannot resist themselves from touching their face.

The website uses simple machine-learning algorithm to recognise images of each individual user touching their face, and not touching their face. Once it registers the user’s images, it uses web notifications to ping them if they touch their face.

If the window is not minimised, a large “NO” written with red, flashes on the screen, as per the Guardian report.

The whole service is trained and run locally on each computer, meaning that neither the webcam data nor the trained AI, needs to be sent back to the developers.

All the calculations from webcam and alerts are done on the computer and are never sent over the internet. The creators of this website warned that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends not touching the face as one of the measure to stop the virus from spreading, according to the Guardian report.

However, the site does not guarantee that this will prevent users from getting the disease. They said “It might help,” Guardian reported.

While the coronavirus pandemic is on the rise as the death toll has surpassed 3000 and the virus has infected more than 95,000 people worldwide, developers are making apps and websites in response to the disease.

Apple and Google had to remove unreliable apps on coronavirus in order to counter misinformation and prevent spreading rumours regarding the disease.