According to a study by Future Market Insights, the contact tracing applications market is set to grow 15% CAGR through 2030.
“Functional advantages of contact tracing applications include superior data quality, easier tracking and monitoring of larger numbers of people in a time effective manner, the ability of real time analysis, and the significant improvements to management and coordination of manual contact tracing teams,” said a lead analyst at Future Market Insights.
Key highlights noted in the report include that the market for contact tracking applications is projected to display exponential growth through the forecast period on the back of the ongoing coronavirus crisis; decentralized, Bluetooth-based applications are likely to gain strong traction as a result of data privacy concerns; Android platforms are likely to contribute significantly to adoption owing through higher penetration of associated smartphone models; and Europe is expected to be a prominent market, with East Asia showing lucrative growth prospects on the back of mandatory use in China.
COVID-19’s impact on the contact tracing applications market
The COVID-19 pandemic has played a role in the contact tracking application market’s growth: according to the study, the pandemic has been the primary driver for the development, deployment and adoption of contact tracing applications. Government initiatives toward social distancing and patient tracking has influenced the industry’s growth, as well.
The study also has projected an increase in disease control applications as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the study, countries such as Ireland and South Korea have been able to use contact tracing applications to gain promising results towards breaking chains of coronavirus patients, limiting the risks of community transmission.
Despite the market’s growth, demand for these applications has been limited to countries with high rates of smartphone penetration. In addition, ethical problems in terms of transparency, privacy and accountability have restrained adoption during this period.
“However, prospects for contact tracing applications remain positive for the post-pandemic era, owing to potential for use in controlling other infectious disease outbreaks worldwide, albeit at a smaller scale,” the report said.
This report analyzed various strategies employed by major companies operating in the contact tracing applications market. Some of the participants operating in the contact tracing applications market include IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, T-Systems, SAP SE, Salesforce.com, Siemens AG and ServiceNow.
GPS technology is doing far more than helping us navigate or receive accurate time. It is now being used to fight the spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Global navigation satellite systems are being used to collect big data on travel and contact, but they are also being used in more unconventional ways: for example, quarantine enforcement and sanitation technology.
Read on to learn about a few recent developments in the world of GNSS/GPS that are bolstering the battle against the novel coronavirus.
Electronic monitoring enforces quarantine
There is a surge of applying ankle monitors to track sick individuals and deter them from spreading the virus further. According to BloombergBusinessweek, one business is thriving because of it: providers of electronic ankle monitors.
Kentucky courts are requiring GPS ankle monitors for people who test positive for COVID-19 and refuse to self-quarantine. Kentucky couple Elizabeth and Isaiah Linscott were two of a growing number of people placed under house arrest after Elizabeth tested positive for COVID-19 and denied signing the Self-isolation and Controlled Movement Agreed Order, a health department document promising she would stay home.
Photo: Regulus Cyber
Elizabeth told Louisville television station WAVE 3 News that she did not sign because she disagreed with the wording of the document. She said that she was concerned about having to contact the health department before traveling, even in the case of an emergency.
“My part was if I have to go to the ER, if I have to go to the hospital, I’m not going to wait to get the approval to go,” she said.
A few days after Elizabeth refused to sign the paperwork, her husband opened their door to an entourage of law enforcement officers serving them with a Health Department order to wear ankle monitors.
“I open up the door, and there’s like eight different people, five different cars, and I’m like ‘what the heck’s going on?’ This guy’s in a suit with a mask. It’s the Health Department guy, and they have three papers for us. For me, her and my daughter,” Isaiah said.
The Linville family is now confined to a 200-foot radius. If they leave their designated quarantine area, their ankle monitors will alert law enforcement.
Alternative to prison
The number of people on house arrest in the United States and across the world has surged as corrections departments struggle to slow the spread of the coronavirus within prisons. An estimated 25 to 30 percent more people are wearing ankle monitors in comparison with a few months ago, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons reported a 160 percent increase in home confinement from late March to July. European corrections departments have similarly put thousands of inmates on house arrest in the last few months.
“Demand has spiked everywhere,” BI Inc. monitoring equipment executive Robert Murnock said to Bloomberg. “We’re getting calls from different jurisdictions and other countries we’ve never worked with.”
Efforts to reduce crowding in prisons mean that the electronic monitoring industry is one of very few industries benefiting financially from the coronavirus pandemic.
“Coronavirus gives electronic monitoring companies an opportunity like they’ve never had before to expand,” parole reform expert James Kilgore said.
On Aug. 3, Singapore announced the rollout of electronic tracking devices to enforce quarantine. Travelers will be required to wear GPS and Bluetooth-powered tracking devices that notify authorities if quarantine is broken or the device is tampered with. The rule went into effect on Aug. 11 and applies to all incoming travelers — resident or nonresident — over the age of 12.
On Aug. 20, the premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan , said his government could soon force people in hotel quarantine to wear electronic monitoring equipment if they are deemed a risk. “If we identify people who are potential flight risks or who might have a criminal history, we are looking at applying monitoring bracelets to them,” he said.
An estimated 25 percent to 30 percent more prisoners are wearing bracelets now compared to the pre-outbreak period. In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Prisons has placed about 4,600 inmates in home confinement, a 160 percent increase since the end of March.
“Demand has spiked everywhere,” said Robert Murnock, vice president for partnership development at BI Inc., a provider of EM technology.
The emergency shift to electronic monitoring spurred by COVID-19 may foretell a long-term shift toward use as an alternative to prison time, reducing clutter and the risk of the virus spreading among inmates.
Photo: LeoPatrizi/E+/Getty Images
Contact tracing via mobile phones
Israel is using covert mobile phone data to track the spread of COVID-19. On July 1, the Knesset approved a bill temporarily reauthorizing mass surveillance of coronavirus-infected citizens by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. The original program lasted from mid-March to June 9.
The contact-tracing program works like this. When a patient is diagnosed with COVID-19, the Israeli Health Ministry provides their personal information — including their mobile number — to the Shin Bet. The Shin Bet then consults a classified database of every person who uses Israeli telecom services to determine who came into contact with the infected individual for more than 15 minutes at a time. After the Shin Bet sends information back to the Health Ministry, the Health Ministry notifies those people via text and tells them to self-quarantine.
The Shin Bet’s newfound role in public health enforcement is quite different from its usual focus. Former Shin Bet agents say the COVID-19 mobile phone tracking technology was originally developed as a counterterrorism measure, and the tracking system being used on Israeli civilians is almost identical to that used for suspected terrorists.
“It’s the same system, the same methods,” retired Shin Bet agent Arik Brabbing said to BBC. “We know that someone was here in the park. We can get from the [mobile phone] company all the details about the hour, the place, exactly the place… and we can understand who else was around.”
Supporters of the mass surveillance program, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argue that reduced privacy is necessary to curb the spread of the virus. However, the Israeli government has come under fire by opponents who claim that the program is intrusive and undemocratic.
Israel’s contact tracing procedures are more secretive than those of South Korea and Taiwan, other countries that mandate central mass surveillance. South Korea and Taiwan both enforce quarantines with mobile-phone tracking, and both have built publicly available COVID-19 data platforms.
The South Korean government has disseminated detailed — but anonymized — information about COVID-19 carriers, including their travel routes and treatment facilities. Citizens broadly support these measures — a testament to collectivism in Korean culture.
Civic engagement and enthusiasm for fighting the pandemic is also remarkable in Taiwan, where the public has been collaborating with the government on a town hall-style website called vTaiwan. Citizen-led initiatives, like a GPS-powered tool for tracking face mask supplies, have been applied nationwide.
Meanwhile in Europe, eight major telecom companies, including Vodafone and Orange, have been supplying anonymized metadata to the European Commission to model and predict the spread of the virus. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is soliciting GPS data from mobile advertising companies rather than carriers themselves.
The two tech giants, Apple and Google, made it easier for health agencies to join its coronavirus exposure notification system, creating a new built-in app within iOS and Android. The app provides real-time notification to users when they are exposed to a sick person.
Virus-killing robots may roam the streets
GPS-based robots, drones and autonomous cars are being deployed to sanitize outdoor spaces, transport medical equipment, and announce safety information to the public.
Robots began rolling around the streets of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, as early as January. China was the first to deploy robots of this type, but India, Spain, France and other countries have followed in their footsteps. In addition to the chemical-spray approach, some companies are pioneering mobile disinfection robots armed with large ultraviolet-C germicidal lights.
Apollo, the autonomous vehicle company of multinational internet giant Baidu, has partnered with Chinese self-driving startup Neolix to transport food and supplies to Beijing Haidian Hospital. Every morning at 10:30 a.m, an unmanned car delivers meals to about 100 frontline workers. The process eliminates direct contact, protecting the safety of food service workers, hospital staff, and patients.
Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Island
A fleet of Apollo and Neolix’s unmanned cars is also responsible for disinfecting all roads on Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Island, an 100,000-square-meter industrial complex in Shanghai. The vehicles are loaded with up to 160 liters of spray disinfectant and can cover the island’s entire road system in about half an hour.
The vehicles at Zhangjiang AI double as nighttime surveillance bots. They patrol the island and make sure that guests are adhering to coronavirus protocols, alerting security personnel if they note suspicious activity.
In addition to using drones to spray disinfectant, South Korea’s government has leveraged the technology for public announcements. On July 4, 300 drones lit the sky above Seoul in a show of appreciation for frontline workers. The drones executed a 10-minute synchronized show that included images of face masks, hand washing, and social distancing.
Summary
As COVID-19 continues to ravage the globe, governments rely on GPS to track the virus, contain it, and fight against it. The battle against coronavirus is still being waged on a global scale, utilizing GPS as a weapon along with many other existing technologies.
The pandemic changed the world forever, and it also highlighted the power of tracking and monitoring location of people and machines. It is another testament to the immense reliance on GPS technology in our modern world.
The increased deployment of these technologies necessitates increased security measures, especially when public health is on the line. Regulus Cyber offers GPS Cybersecurity software. To read more about it, visit www.regulus.com.
Contact tracing can help stem the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It involves tracking the movement and interactions of infected individuals to identify others at risk.
National and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have included containment through quarantine and restriction of movement. When properly implemented, these solutions limit spread of the contagion to prevent it from overwhelming healthcare and emergency management systems.
According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and virtually all medical professionals, any effective strategy to return the world to normal requires three components: testing, contact tracing and isolation.
While testing to find the people who are infected is the absolute top priority, contact tracing is vital for stopping a disease from spreading out of control. It involves tracking the movement and interactions of infected individuals to identify others at risk. Any positive test without contact tracing is bad public health — it misses an opportunity to reduce the spread of the virus.
While the concept of contact tracing has just entered popular consciousness, it has been a standard public health tool for a century. For example, in the 1930s, Great Britain used it to contain the incidence of sexually transmitted infections. In the 1960s and 1970s, South American, African and Asian countries used it to eradicate smallpox. Additional diseases for which contact tracing is performed include tuberculosis, measles, HIV, Ebola, bloodborne infections, serious bacterial infections and novel infections.
What Is Contact Tracing?
The World Health Organization describes three basic steps:
Contact identification. Those who have been in contact with someone who has been confirmed to be infected are identified, by asking about their activities and those of the people around them.
Contact listing. All persons who have had contact with the infected person are informed of their status and told to receive early care if they develop symptoms.
Follow-up. Contacts are monitored for symptoms and tested for signs of infection.
In some cases, quarantine or isolation is required for high-risk contacts.
The enormous dimensions of the current pandemic, however, challenge traditional models of contact tracing, which are very resource intensive. In search of a technological assist, several Asian countries already have been taking advantage of the functionalities of smartphones to scale up contact tracing to match the pandemic’s rate of growth, such as the Trace Together app built by the Singapore government. Companies and organizations around the world are following suit, including Britain’s National Health Service, a pan-European initiative, and an unprecedented joint venture by Apple and Google.
Automating Contact Tracing
A study published on March 31 in Science concluded that “viral spread is too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing but could be controlled if this process [were] faster, more efficient and happened at scale.” A contact-tracing app that memorizes close contacts and immediately notifies users if they have had contact with infected individuals, prompting them to self-isolate, could control the pandemic without need for mass quarantines if enough people used it, the study argues.
Privacy versus Protection. A similar app has been deployed in China, where people are required to use it to be allowed to move beyond their neighborhood, enter public spaces, or use public transport. A central database collects data on each user’s movement and coronavirus diagnosis, artificial intelligence analyzes these data, then the app displays a red, amber or green code that determines the user’s freedom of movement. This app has been credited with significantly helping China suppress the pandemic, but has been criticized for its disregard for data protection and privacy.
Relying on fundamental epidemiological principles and common smartphone functionality, the Science study authors designed a simple algorithm to replace manual contact tracing. “Coronavirus diagnoses are communicated to the server, enabling recommendation of risk-stratified quarantine and physical distancing measures in those now known to be possible contacts, while preserving the anonymity of the infected individual.” Symptomatic individuals could use the app to request testing, and everyone could use it to access COVID-19-related health services, information and instructions, or even to request deliveries of food or medicine during self-isolation.
Public trust in the app and how the gathered data are used would be critical to its success. The study’s authors lay out a series of requirements for its ethical implementation, then point out that “the algorithmic approach we propose avoids the need for coercive surveillance, since the system can have very large impacts and achieve sustained epidemic suppression, even with partial uptake.”
The authors of a similar article in the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth write that a contact-tracing system can limit any central coordination to notifying users who have been in contact with an infected person. Their core idea is that it does not matter where someone contacts an infected person, only that they were in close enough contact to risk infection. Particularly sensitive location data, such as GPS or phone cell data, “is actually neither necessary nor useful.” No one learns who the user is because the app is not linked to an identity, and it neither records nor stores location data.
The authors argue their proposed app is the most effective epidemiologically because it would determine which people were in close proximity, and it would receive user cooperation. “Only if people trust a system — because it does not spy on them — will the system find broad support in the population.”
GPS, Bluetooth or Both?
Technologically, the concepts of location and proximity are embodied in two standard smartphone components: GPS receivers and Bluetooth transceivers. GPS-derived location data makes it possible to map and analyze the movements of individuals and of large numbers of people; for example, it is how we know that many in this country have begun relaxing social distancing rules ahead of the lifting of legal mandates. Bluetooth’s use of low energy, generally a drawback, becomes an advantage here because it can tell us whether two or more people have been within 1.5 to 2 meters of an infected person for at least 10 to 15 minutes — when the risk of infection is highest. This knowledge can enable newly infected, pre-symptomatic people to self-isolate and not infect others.
Numerous companies are developing and proposing smartphone-based contact tracing apps.
Vesedia Mobile Technologies proposes that people who test positive to COVID-19 be asked to provide information about public places they visited in the preceding days and at what times, using their phone location history for verification. The information would be anonymized by healthcare officials, and entered into a database that would be publicly accessible via a website and mobile app.
Ramesh Raskar. (Photo: MIT/John Werner)
Intersections. The COVID Safe Paths phone app and the Safe Places browser tool for contact tracers were created by Ramesh Raskar and other researchers at the MIT Media Lab. If a user tests positive and consents, his or her data is uploaded, redacted by healthcare authorities to remove any personally identifiable information, and downloaded by the app.
The app then performs “intersections” — it identifies and notifies people with whom the infected person has crossed paths. By clicking on intersections, users can display their timeline for the past 14 days, in a calendar view, which tells them how many intersections have occurred each day.
The app also provides news reports from authorized local news channels, based on each user’s position or if they tap the URL for their local healthcare authority, said Abhishek Singh, the program’s tech lead, who is helping with the app’s development.
“We are also building an interoperable architecture,” Singh said. “Because there are many contact tracing apps already in the wild, we want to make sure that they have some common standards and guidelines that enable them to utilize data from other apps securely and through consent.” More than 1,200 people are voluntarily contributing to the project. “It is being led by the open-source community, and all our source code is out there and anybody can contribute,” Singh said.
Safe Places is helping health authorities by making the data and insights visible, enabling them to make the right decisions such as targeting resources to areas that need them most, helping them impose restrictions such as lockdowns, or reopen the economy. “The economy will not reopen in a single burst, but step by step.” Singh said. “A dashboard that allows them to monitor where the infection is spreading and where it has been contained helps them decide where to take which steps.”
The GPS Advantage. The uptake required for GPS-enabled contact tracing to be successful is generally lower than for Bluetooth-based contact tracing, Singh argues, citing an Oxford University simulation. “With GPS, you do not need people to have the app already downloaded for it to be effective,” he points out. A person who tests positive for the virus can use the Safe Place web tool to manually create a GPS trail and help healthy people. This is one of the biggest advantages of GPS compared to Bluetooth, because the latter requires exchanging information directly through the hardware, which cannot be done after the fact.
Because the app is open source, any government can deploy it using its own IT infrastructure. However, a government that wants to adopt Safe Paths must sign a letter that commits it to complying with privacy and ethical guidelines. Preventing authoritarian governments and nosy employers from requiring people to use this app and reveal their data requires stringent guidelines as to how it is deployed and who can access the data, Singh said.
Apple and Google Join Forces
Apple and Google have joined in an unprecedented alliance to develop a system for notifying people who have been near others who have tested positive for COVID-19. Eight out of 10 people in the United States own smartphones, and the two companies’ operating systems run more than 99% of them. Apps built directly into iOS and Android, especially if interoperable, could dramatically increase the reach of public health authorities (the only organizations that would receive the data). To avoid fragmentation and encourage wider adoption, Apple and Google will allow only one app per country to use their system, but will allow U.S. states to use it and support countries that opt for a state or regional approach.
The system will use Bluetooth signals from phones to detect encounters rather than GPS location data. It will not run ads, will require users to opt-in, be decentralized, and use randomized IDs not tied to a user’s actual identity to communicate potential contacts with individuals with a confirmed positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
With GPS, you do not need people to have the app already downloaded for it to be effective.
API Coming. On May 20, Apple and Google released an API to developers. Next, they will issue a system update to build in contact tracing at the OS level. Should a user’s phone notify them of a possible contact, they will be prompted to download and install a public health app from their local health authority to obtain trusted instructions.
Developers of coronavirus-related apps for several U.S. states have argued that GPS location data is vital to identify infection hotspots and track outbreaks. However, for various technical reasons, workarounds designed to bypass the decision by Apple and Google and collect GPS data in connection with their contact tracing system would work poorly.
Ethical and Equity Concerns
“The work that we are doing for COVID-19 is pretty similar to work that we do on a routine basis with other reportable communicable diseases,” said Lisa Ferguson, nursing supervisor for Communicable Disease Investigations and Case Management for Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes the city of Portland. Most commonly, her unit is notified of illnesses by the state database, which receives electronic lab reports. “We assign that as a case to somebody on our team, and they call the person, interview them, ask some questions about their illness, their symptoms and where they could have possibly been exposed,” Ferguson explained. “Then, they talk about who that person might have exposed and where they were from two days before they became sick up until the time of the interview or the time that their symptoms were resolved.”
The Multnomah County, Oregon, Disease Detection Team. (Photo: Multnomah County, Oregon)
How could technology — such as smartphone location data — best help Ferguson’s team conduct contact tracing for COVID-19? “In the public health world, we are not used to having access to technology in that way,” she said. “We need to have some ethical discussions before we are prepared to utilize something like a technology that can track people.” Also, unlike tracking measles, which requires knowing whether someone was in an airspace and who was there after them, “We do not automatically consider someone to have been exposed if they were in the same airspace as someone who tested positive.”
If the privacy concerns could be adequately addressed, receiving a list of all the people who were less than six feet away for at least 10 minutes from someone who had tested positive could help her team scale up, Ferguson said. Her team would then reach out to those people, using such language as “You may have been exposed,” and “Please watch yourself closely.”
Ferguson’s team always has “equity concerns,” fearing they might under-identify groups that do not have access to the technology. “It is a supplemental tool, but it certainly would not replace the work that we are doing,” she said.
Help Wanted
Safely reopening the United States will require a new workforce of at least 100,000 contact tracers, according to a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and other experts. Any technological assist to contact tracing does not diminish this need. For example, smartphone alerts can help filter out those at low or no risk so that human tracers can focus on genuine cases, people at higher risk, or those who are harder to contact.
Two out of 10 people in the United States do not own a smartphone, and only 42% of those above the age of 65 — who suffer 80% of the deaths from COVID-19 — do, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll. Hardly any homeless people own a smartphone. Among those most vulnerable to the pandemic are immigrants who do not speak English and are fearful of efforts to collect their personal information, strengthening the need for this to be done in person by trusted community members.
Finally, even if Google and Apple’s automated service is widely adopted and works well, it will require many thousands of health workers to conduct tests and follow-ups.
Vesedia Mobile Technologies is offering to deploy its location platform to help control the COVID-19 pandemic through tracking and dissemination of information about “at risk” infection areas and places, and times when they were known to have infection — a process referred to as contact tracing.
Vesedia is a technology startup with a suite of mobile apps for children and family safety based on a location-sharing platform and location-tracking artificial intelligence (AI).
“The platform would warn people that passed through these places at matching times,” explained Ruslan Shalaev, co-founder and team leader, Vesedia. Shalaev developed a popular app for family safety: Safely – Family Location; and serves as a lead research on user-location monitoring AI in an academic partnership with Binghamton University and Lviv National University.
The Safely – Family Location app could be used to disseminate data on infection areas, and access to the API would be provided for other application developers and sites, Shalaev said.
The platform would be applicable after the initial pandemic is contained. “It would help with restarting the economy and resuming normal business operations by providing a mechanism to track, control and suppress new outbreaks,” Shalaev said.
Data Sources
Under the plan, people that test positive to COVID-19 would be asked to provide information about public places they visited in the preceding days, and at what times. Individuals that provide the information can confirm that it’s accurate from their phone location history.
The information would be anonymized by healthcare officials, and entered into a database that would be publicly accessible via a website and mobile app.
Image: Vesedia
Mobile App
The mobile app aspect is especially valuable from information dissemination standpoint, because other people in “at risk” areas can receive automated alerts to self-quarantine and get tested based on their device location history.
The app is ready and available for download in Google Play and Apple App Store.
Image: Vesedia
Image: Vesedia
Workflow diagram
Workflow diagram. (Image: Vesedia)
System architecture
System architecture. (Image: Vesedia)
Approach validity
The approach has been successfully applied in Singapore, but without active alerts, with dissemination of information being done manually. The Singapore government was able to contain the virus without shutting down businesses, schools, public transit and restaurants.
Vesedia location apps
Vesedia is a tech startup founded in 2016 by SUNY Binghamton Computer Science graduates. It developed SmartAI location tracking and sharing platform. Its apps include Safely – Family Location, Virtual Nanny, MeetCity – Live Events, Blind Date, Sponter – Social Network in partnership with Lviv National University and Binghamton University. The apps are available for download in the Google Play and Apple App stores.
Vesedia research on “Location-Based Behavioral Patterns Modeling” was published at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems (IEEE/IDAACS) conference in Metz, France in 2019.
A team of medical researchers and bioethicists at Oxford University published results in Science that offer further understanding of coronavirus transmission.
The evidence is enabling several international partners to assess the feasibility of developing mobile apps for instant contact tracing in record time.
If rapidly and widely developed, the mobile apps could help to significantly slow transmission rates and support countries emerging from lockdowns as restrictions are gradually eased.
Partners include the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI) and NHSX, a joint unit comprised of teams from NHS England and the UK’s Department of Health & Social Care.
Critically, the researchers suggest a mobile app can help slow the spread of infection until vaccines and antiviral treatments become widely available.
“We need a mobile contact tracing app to urgently support health services to control coronavirus transmission, target interventions and keep people safe,” explained Christophe Fraser, Oxford University’s Big Data Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, an a lead author on the Science paper.
“Our analysis suggests that about half of transmissions occur in the early phase of the infection, before you show any symptoms of infection,” Fraser said. “Our mathematical models also highlight that traditional public-health contact tracing approaches provide incomplete data and cannot keep up with the pace of this pandemic.”
The project is co-led by David Bonsall, senior researcher at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine and clinician at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. “The mobile app concept we’ve mathematically modeled is simple and doesn’t need to track your location,” Bonsall said.
Anonymous alerts
“It uses a low-energy version of Bluetooth to log a memory of all the app users with whom you have come into close proximity over the last few days,” Bonsall said. “If you then become infected, these people are alerted instantly and anonymously, and advised to go home and self-isolate.
“If app users decide to share additional data, they could support health services to identify trends and target interventions to reach those most in need,” Bonsall said.
The authors argue that a mobile app can reduce transmission at any stage of the epidemic: in countries or regions where the epidemic is just emerging, at the peak of the epidemic, or to support a safe transition out of restricted movement or lockdown.
It could also help to reduce the serious social, psychological and economic impacts caused by widespread lockdowns. Critically, the researchers suggest a mobile app can help slow the spread of infection until vaccines and antiviral treatments become widely available.
Good citizenship
“A contact tracing app can foster good citizenship by alerting people at risk,” Fraser explained. “It can also help ease us out of confinement if we know we’ve not been in contact with anyone infected we can leave home safely, whilst still protecting our loved ones and avoiding a broader resurgence of coronavirus in our community.”
Given the level of infection across much of Europe, the team believe ongoing development of a mobile app partnership across the union would massively reduce transmission and avoid a resurgence in the number of cases, providing an opportunity for all citizens using mobile contact tracing apps to contribute towards ending the epidemic. An app strategy could also be used by low- and middle-income countries, earlier in the epidemic, to rapidly control transmission and get ahead of the epidemic now.
The Oxford team highlight that the mobile contact tracing app should still be combined with isolation of cases, tracing and quarantine of contacts, physical distancing, scaled-up diagnostic testing, decontamination and hygiene measures.
As Bonsall explains “If the mobile app is widely adopted in any country, and combined with other critical interventions such as physical distancing and widespread testing, our models suggest the epidemic could be brought under control. This app is a tool for each and every person affected to contribute towards protecting their health services, supporting vulnerable people and simultaneously gradually releasing communities out of extended quarantine.”
Rigorous ethical standards
Today’s Science study highlights the importance of rigorous ethical standards underpinning the successful and appropriate use of mobile phone technology in addressing the coronavirus pandemic, including a number of ethical requirements needed to foster well-founded public trust and confidence.
“With transparent and inclusive ethical oversight to ensure genuine public trust, it is possible to both save lives and protect civil liberties,” said Michael Parker, director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities and one of the paper’s authors.
“The app should be opt-in, provide secure data storage and privacy protection, and be informed by public and user engagement at every stage of implementation. With these guarantees and, if widely installed by users across a country or regional bloc, a mobile app could even help to end the epidemic,” Parker said.
Official apps only
As mobile apps launch over the coming weeks and months, the Oxford research team urges people to support official apps, developed by trusted institutions, and their partners, such as the mobile contact tracing apps under advanced assessment in several European countries.
Fraser concludes, “Our hope is to support communities with life-saving information as the pandemic worsens and help to release countries from large-scale isolation. The maths is clear: the more people that use a contract tracing app the better chance we have of getting ahead of this epidemic and eventually stopping it in its tracks. If a country reduces the epidemic growth rate to below zero, the epidemic will rapidly decline and eventually stop. Together we can make this possible.”
Download results
Results of a mobile-app-focused survey from a large representative sample of the UK population (1,055 respondents) conducted March 20-22 are available here. Other country surveys are also available for Italy, Germany and France, currently in each language.
