Epidemic contact tracing with smartphone sensors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a smartphone-based contact tracing method using multiple sensors to significantly reduce false positives and improve accuracy over Bluetooth-only systems, enhancing trustworthiness for epidemic control.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-sensor contact tracing approach combining WiFi, acoustic, air pressure, and magnetic sensors, which is among the first to do so.

Findings

Achieved up to 95% fewer false positives

62% more accurate than Bluetooth-only systems

Validated in various realistic environments

Abstract

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 air pressure and the magnetic field for ambient 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% fewer false positives, and 62% more accurate than 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.