A New System for Surveillance and Digital Contact Tracing for COVID-19: Spatiotemporal Reporting Over Network and GPS

Abstract

The current pandemic of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has highlighted the importance of rapid control of the transmission of infectious diseases. This is particularly important for COVID-19, where many individuals are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms but can still spread the disease. Current systems for controlling transmission rely on patients to report their symptoms to medical professionals and be able to recall and trace all their contacts from the previous few days. This is unrealistic in the modern world. However, existing smartphone-based GPS and social media technology may provide a suitable alternative. We, therefore, developed a mini-program within the app WeChat. This analyzes data from all users and traces close contacts of all patients. This permits early tracing and quarantine of potential sources of infection. Data from the mini-program can also be merged with other data to predict epidemic trends, calculate individual and population risks, and provide recommendations for individual and population protection action. It may also improve our understanding of how the disease spreads. However, there are a number of unresolved questions about the use of smartphone data for health surveillance, including how to protect individual privacy and provide safeguards against data breaches.

Blockchain and COVID-19 Pandemic: Applications and Challenges

“…Transparency and immutability of data assure that the health data of users such as the COVID-19 test result cannot be altered or deleted by the adversaries or healthcare collaborators. Also, it preserves the privacy of users data to comply with privacy rules as stated in general data protection regulation (GDPR) privacy laws [50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. The design parameters necessary to design and implement a contact tracking solution for identifying social interactions among people are highlighted in Fig.…”

Epidemic contact tracing with smartphone sensors

“…GPS based solution, which records the user's precise position in latitude and longitude, has also been attempted, with the most recent work by Raskar et al (Raskar et al 2020), Wang et al (Wang, Ding, and Xiong 2020), and the HaMagen app by the Israeli government 4 (Sönmez and Elik 2020), which build the GPS location trails of the registered users. Having access to this type of detailed location coordination would make contact tracing much easier and more accurate, should the privacy concern be properly addressed.…”

Use of Artificial Intelligence on spatio-temporal data to generate insights during COVID-19 pandemic: A Review

“…For example, contact tracing through the use of mobile application such as ''WeChat'' has been effective in many countries. 65 However, one major limitation is their inability to ingest a large volume of data for decision making and adapt accordingly. 66 Due to the improvement in processing power of mobile devices, AI algorithms can be adapted to solving problems such as proximity identification and improve the accuracy and reliability of these systems through adaptation and real-time learning.…”