Listening to bluetooth beacons for epidemic risk mitigation

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic let to efforts to develop and deploy digital contact tracing systems to expedite contact tracing and risk notification. Unfortunately, the success of these systems has been limited, partly owing to poor interoperability with manual contact tracing, low adoption rates, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2022-04, Vol.12 (1), p.5558-5558, Article 5558
Main Authors: Barthe, Gilles, Viti, Roberta De, Druschel, Peter, Garg, Deepak, Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel, Ingo, Pierfrancesco, Kremer, Heiner, Lentz, Matthew, Lorch, Lars, Mehta, Aastha, Schölkopf, Bernhard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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639/705/1042
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Auscultation
Contact Tracing
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 - prevention & control
Environmental information
Epidemics
Epidemiology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
multidisciplinary
Pandemics
Pandemics - prevention & control
Privacy
Risk assessment
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic let to efforts to develop and deploy digital contact tracing systems to expedite contact tracing and risk notification. Unfortunately, the success of these systems has been limited, partly owing to poor interoperability with manual contact tracing, low adoption rates, and a societally sensitive trade-off between utility and privacy. In this work, we introduce a new privacy-preserving and inclusive system for epidemic risk assessment and notification that aims to address these limitations. Rather than capturing pairwise encounters between user devices as done by existing systems, our system captures encounters between user devices and beacons placed in strategic locations where infection clusters may originate. Epidemiological simulations using an agent-based model demonstrate that, by utilizing location and environmental information and interoperating with manual contact tracing, our system can increase the accuracy of contact tracing actions and may help reduce epidemic spread already at low adoption.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-09440-1