Digital Contact Tracing: Large-Scale Geolocation Data as an Alternative to Bluetooth-Based Apps Failure

Cabañas, José González; Cuevas, Antonio; Maier, Martin

doi:10.3390/electronics10091093

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Only epidemiologically significant gatherings, i.e. lasting longer than 15 min [37], are considered; note that indoor airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to occur on spatial scales comparable to those covered by Wi-Fi APs [38], making Wi-Fi a good tool to support traditional CT [39]. Two separate distributions Ψfalse(sfalse) (figure 4 a ) are calculated for time periods with two different levels of activity restrictions: partial opening and closure of the university [40] (see Methods).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sideward contact tracing and the control of epidemics in large gatherings

Mancastroppa

Guizzo

Castellano

et al. 2022

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Effective contact tracing is crucial to containing epidemic spreading without disrupting societal activities, especially during a pandemic. Large gatherings play a key role, potentially favouring superspreading events. However, the effects of tracing in large groups have not been fully assessed so far. We show that in addition to forward tracing, which reconstructs to whom the disease spreads, and backward tracing, which searches from whom the disease spreads, a third ‘sideward’ tracing is always present, when tracing gatherings. This is an indirect tracing that detects infected asymptomatic individuals, even if they have been neither directly infected by nor directly transmitted the infection to the index case. We analyse this effect in a model of epidemic spreading for SARS-CoV-2, within the framework of simplicial activity-driven temporal networks. We determine the contribution of the three tracing mechanisms to the suppression of epidemic spreading, showing that sideward tracing induces a non-monotonic behaviour in the tracing efficiency, as a function of the size of the gatherings. Based on our results, we suggest an optimal choice for the sizes of the gatherings to be traced and we test the strategy on an empirical dataset of gatherings on a university campus.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sideward contact tracing and the control of epidemics in large gatherings

Mancastroppa

Guizzo

Castellano

et al. 2022

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…In contrast, our systems used low-cost and power efficient off-the-shelf sensors. In relation to privacy preserving purposes, our system is able to successfully track hospital/office staff inside the premises only where beacons/readers are installed, as opposed to other systems using geo-localisation [ 68 , 69 ].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Efficiency and Performance of IoT BLE and RFID-Based Systems for Achieving Contact Tracing to Monitor Infection Spread among Hospital and Office Staff

Gendy

Tham

Harrison

et al. 2023

Sensors

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COVID-19 is highly contagious and spreads rapidly; it can be transmitted through coughing or contact with virus-contaminated hands, surfaces, or objects. The virus spreads faster indoors and in crowded places; therefore, there is a huge demand for contact tracing applications in indoor environments, such as hospitals and offices, in order to measure personnel proximity while placing as little load on them as possible. Contact tracing is a vital step in controlling and restricting pandemic spread; however, traditional contact tracing is time-consuming, exhausting, and ineffective. As a result, more research and application of smart digital contact tracing is necessary. As the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable sensor device studies have grown in popularity, this work has been based on the practicality and successful implementation of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and radio frequency identification (RFID) IoT based wireless systems for achieving contact tracing. Our study presents autonomous, low-cost, long-battery-life wireless sensing systems for contact tracing applications in hospital/office environments; these systems are developed with off-the-shelf components and do not rely on end user participation in order to prevent any inconvenience. Performance evaluation of the two implemented systems is carried out under various real practical settings and scenarios; these two implemented centralised IoT contact tracing devices were tested and compared demonstrating their efficiency results.

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“…There are also articles mainly focused on engineering issues, such as [16]- [18]. Unlike this work which proposes new generic cryptographic frameworks for contact tracing systems, these studies focus on implementing existing technologies and building concrete applications.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, [18] uses a different approach that involves IoT, and only traces diagnosed users. Whereas [16] uses geolocation data in contact tracing but only presents possible methods to achieve privacy without analysis.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Adaptive Privacy Preserving Contact Tracing System: A Construction From Public Key Rerandomizable BLS Signatures

Wang

Jourenko

et al. 2022

IEEE Access

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The COVID-19 pandemic has made the scientific community devise means to implement "contact tracing" mechanisms to mitigate the spread of the infection. The crucial idea is to scan and record close contacts between users using mobile device, in order to notify persons when their close contact(s) is diagnosed positive. First, the ability granted to service providers of the contact tracing systems to access user data violates user privacy, and attackers can fabricate identities and contact records in their devices, which harms the integrity of the system. Moreover, current contact tracing systems' false-positive rate is too high to be practical as they do not filter scan results outside the range of infections, since the range of transmission for droplets is far less than the scanning range for Bluetooth Low Energy used by these systems. Furthermore, current systems neglect airborne transmission, a far cry from a tool against viruses suspended in the air. In this paper, we propose a cryptographic framework for contact tracing and provide a construction based on public key rerandomizable BLS signature, being capable of providing users of contact tracing with comprehensive privacy protection. Besides, we also implement a commitment scheme to prevent fabrication of identities and contact records. To prove the concept of our framework and to solve other problems mentioned above, we proposed a new contact tracing system, using environmental factors (temperature, humidity and airflow) to filter out results outside estimated effective transmission distance, and also take airborne transmission into consideration. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our design by implementing our algorithm on mobile devices with satisfactory results.

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Digital Contact Tracing: Large-Scale Geolocation Data as an Alternative to Bluetooth-Based Apps Failure

Cited by 15 publications

References 13 publications

Sideward contact tracing and the control of epidemics in large gatherings

Sideward contact tracing and the control of epidemics in large gatherings

Comparing Efficiency and Performance of IoT BLE and RFID-Based Systems for Achieving Contact Tracing to Monitor Infection Spread among Hospital and Office Staff

Environmental Adaptive Privacy Preserving Contact Tracing System: A Construction From Public Key Rerandomizable BLS Signatures

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