Epidemic contact tracing with smartphone sensors
Contact tracing is widely considered as an effective procedure in the fight against epidemic diseases. However, one of the challenges for technology based contact tracing is the high number of false positives, questioning its trust-worthiness and efficiency amongst the wider population for mass adoption. To this end, this paper proposes a novel, yet practical smartphone based contact tracing approach, employing WiFi and acoustic sound for relative distance estimate, in addition to the ambient air pressure and magnetic field environment matching. We present a model combining 6 smartphone sensors, prioritising some of them when certain conditions are met. We empirically verified our approach in various realistic environments to demonstrate an achievement of up to 95 Bluetooth-only system. To the best of our knowledge, this paper was one of the first work to propose a combination of smartphone sensors for contact tracing.
READ FULL TEXT