Applicability of Mobile Contact Tracing in Fighting Pandemic (COVID-19): Issues, Challenges and Solutions

Dar, Aaqib Bashir; Lone, Auqib Hamid; Zahoor, Saniya; Khan, Afshan Amin; Naaz, Roohie

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3683404

Cited by 33 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The applicability and technology structure of mobile contact tracing in fighting the pandemic is discussed and the evaluation framework for contact tracing solutions is proposed. The aforementioned measures taken by countries and regions are evaluated in the research (Dar et al , 2020). Then a readability analysis to evaluate the comprehensibility of the privacy policies of several CTA is performed (Zhang et al , 2020).…”

Section: Literature Review: Opportunities and Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to evaluate the contact tracing application, a comparative analysis is conducted based on the contact tracing evaluation framework from Dar et al (2020). It is a five-step method for evaluating a particular contact tracing solution including the nature of the model, technology employed, privacy, tracing model and scalability.…”

Section: Demonstration and Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cyber-physical spatial temporal analytics for digital twin-enabled smart contact tracing

Zhao

Zhong²,

Kuo³

et al. 2021

IMDS

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PurposePhysical gatherings at social events have been found as one of the main causes of COVID-19 transmission all over the world. Smartphone has been used for contact tracing by exchanging messages through Bluetooth signals. However, recent confirmed cases found in venues indicated that indirect transmission of the causative virus occurred, resulting from virus contamination of common objects, virus aerosolization in a confined space or spread from inadequate ventilation environment with no indication of human direct or close contact observed.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a novel cyber-physical architecture for spatial temporal analytics (iGather for short). Locations with time windows are modeled as digital chromosomes in cyberspace to represent human activity instances in the physical world.FindingsResults show that the high spatial temporal correlated but indirect tracing can be realized through the deployment of physical hardware and spatial temporal analytics including mobility and traceability analytics. iGather is tested and verified in different spatial temporal correlated cases. From a management perspective of mobilizing social capacity, the venue plays not only a promotion role in boosting the utilization rates but also a supervision-assisted role for keeping the venue in a safe and healthy situation.Social implicationsThis research is of particular significance when physical distancing measures are being relaxed with situations gradually become contained. iGather is able to help the general public to ease open questions: Is a venue safe enough? Is there anyone at a gathering at risk? What should one do when someone gets infected without raising privacy issues?Originality/valueThis study contributes to the existing literature by cyber-physical spatial temporal analytics to trace COVID-19 indirect contacts through digital chromosome, a representation of digital twin technology. Also, the authors have proposed a venue-oriented management perspective to resolve privacy-preserving and unitization rate concerns.

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Section: Literature Review: Opportunities and Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Demonstration and Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber-physical spatial temporal analytics for digital twin-enabled smart contact tracing

Zhao

Zhong²,

Kuo³

et al. 2021

IMDS

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“…EPIC introduces a matching method which uses homomorphic encryption to match common wireless devices between the infected and the other users. However, the system can suffer from serious privacy losses and above all, it has scalability problems [12]. TraceTogether was the first centralized BLE-based solution [20].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anyway, more sophisticated approaches relying on GPS exist, which, thanks to multi party computation and other complex cryptographic mechanisms, are able to effectively contrast the issues arising from non-trusted servers [10], [11]. However, these solutions are not scalable [12], due to the computational overhead required by cryptographic protocols.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Privacy-Preserving Solution for Proximity Tracing Avoiding Identifier Exchanging

Buccafurri

Angelis

Labrini

2020

2020 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW)

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Digital contact tracing is one of the actions useful, in combination with other measures, to manage an epidemic diffusion of an infectious disease in an after-lock-down phase. This is a very timely issue, due to the pandemic of COVID-19 we are unfortunately living. Apps for contact tracing aim to detect proximity of users and to evaluate the related risk in terms of possible contagious. Existing approaches leverage BLE or GPS, or their combination, even though the prevailing approach is BLE-based and relies on a decentralized model requiring the mutual exchange of ephemeral identifiers among users' smartphones. Unfortunately, a number of security and privacy concerns exist in this kind of solutions, mainly due to the exchange of identifiers, while GPS-based solutions (inherently centralized) may suffer from threats concerning massive surveillance. In this paper, we propose a solution leveraging GPS to detect proximity, and BLE only to improve accuracy, with no exchange of identifiers. Unlike related existing solutions, no complex cryptographic mechanism is adopted, while ensuring that the server does not learn anything about locations of users.

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“…Digital contact tracing uses various combinations of close-range, proximity-based sensing technologies, such as smartphones, wearables [16], Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons [14], and positioning-based solutions [17] that use anonymous or randomly coded locations [11]. Regardless of the choice of technology, they all share the same goal: To identify and inform those who may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus, or those who are in the high-risk category, so that they can take appropriate actions such as isolation, care, and treatment [18]. In addition to contact tracing apps, ongoing effort is being made to monitor post COVID-19 measures using the IoT [10][11][12][13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Interoperable Architecture for the Internet of COVID-19 Things (IoCT) Using Open Geospatial Standards—Case Study: Workplace Reopening

Liang

Saeedi

Ojagh

et al. 2020

Sensors

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To safely protect workplaces and the workforce during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, a scalable integrated sensing solution is required in order to offer real-time situational awareness and early warnings for decision-makers. However, an information-based solution for industry reopening is ineffective when the necessary operational information is locked up in disparate real-time data silos. There is a lot of ongoing effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic using different combinations of low-cost, location-based contact tracing, and sensing technologies. These ad hoc Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for COVID-19 were developed using different data models and protocols without an interoperable way to interconnect these heterogeneous systems and exchange data on people and place interactions. This research aims to design and develop an interoperable Internet of COVID-19 Things (IoCT) architecture that is able to exchange, aggregate, and reuse disparate IoT sensor data sources in order for informed decisions to be made after understanding the real-time risks in workplaces based on person-to-place interactions. The IoCT architecture is based on the Sensor Web paradigm that connects various Things, Sensors, and Datastreams with an indoor geospatial data model. This paper presents a study of what, to the best of our knowledge, is the first real-world integrated implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and IndoorGML standards to calculate the risk of COVID-19 online using a workplace reopening case study. The proposed IoCT offers a new open standard-based information model, architecture, methodologies, and software tools that enable the interoperability of disparate COVID-19 monitoring systems with finer spatial-temporal granularity. A workplace cleaning use case was developed in order to demonstrate the capabilities of this proposed IoCT architecture. The implemented IoCT architecture included proximity-based contact tracing, people density sensors, a COVID-19 risky behavior monitoring system, and the contextual building geospatial data.

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Applicability of Mobile Contact Tracing in Fighting Pandemic (COVID-19): Issues, Challenges and Solutions

Cited by 33 publications

References 26 publications

Cyber-physical spatial temporal analytics for digital twin-enabled smart contact tracing

Cyber-physical spatial temporal analytics for digital twin-enabled smart contact tracing

A Privacy-Preserving Solution for Proximity Tracing Avoiding Identifier Exchanging

An Interoperable Architecture for the Internet of COVID-19 Things (IoCT) Using Open Geospatial Standards—Case Study: Workplace Reopening

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