Bluetooth technology is being used to determine your risk of COVID-19 infection?

Tram Ho

Contact tracking, or finding all who have been in contact with a COVID-19-positive patient, is an effective disease control tool.

Once developed by the US military 100 years ago , to manage sexually transmitted infections among soldiers, follow-up exposure has also helped people overcome many diseases, including meningitis , polio, HIV and Ebola.

Now, another ” aging ” mobile technology, more than 30 years old, is expected to help us track our exposure more effectively in the face of the long-term coexistence of COVID-19. .

It’s Bluetooth, the wireless standard that is helping you stream music from your phone to your car speakers, or connect your smartphone to wireless headphones. Bluetooth is currently being tested in the hope of becoming the future of contact tracking in the digital age.

[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 1.
[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 2.

Tracking exposure in a digital age has become easier than ever, because most people now carry location-aware devices. Since the corona virus hit China, more than a billion people have downloaded an intelligent mobile application created by tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to track virus infections.

The application shares the GPS location and personal data of mobile users with the police, to help them determine people’s risk of COVID-19 infection, based on where they go and who they meet. .

Then each person will be assigned color codes, red is at high risk, blue is at low risk. Every time they go to public places like a grocery store, they have to show the phone to the cashier.

A similar strategy is being used by Israeli telcos. Their national security agency also wants to collect people’s locations based on GPS data to track exposure to COVID-19 infections during a pandemic.

But in the West, concerns over privacy and government data misuse have turned technologists to an older technology: Bluetooth. Unlike government efforts to collect GPS data like China as well as South Korea, Bluetooth ensures anonymity and decentralization.

Everybody’s smartphone can generate Bluetooth signals in a short range, converted into a random number sequence. These numbers, not the name or address or location of a person standing, can be used to determine the risk of infection.

So if you’re still turning on Bluetooth on your phone in a Western country, maybe someday in May, you’ll get a warning message from your local health authority, saying You have been in contact with someone who was positive for COVID-19.

Singapore became the first country to use Bluetooth to track the contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an application called Trace Together. Many academic institutions and health agencies around the globe are also working to perfect Bluetooth-based digital contact technologies and applications.

[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 3.
[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 4.

A team of researchers at Stanford University and the University of Waterloo is working on an application called Covid Watch. At MIT, researchers created the Safe Path platform, using a combination of GPS and Bluetooth technology.

In Europe, a German-led effort called the Pan-European privacy tracking technology platform, or PEPP-PT, is seeking to create an application programming interface (API) for all. all 27 EU member states. In the UK, the NHSX, a digital unit of the national health authority, is also testing its own contact-tracking application.

Most digital tracking applications will work like this:

Your phone creates a temporary contact number, called BC. If two users have a contact tracking number downloaded near each other (within 2 meters), and extend it for a specified period of time, their two phones will continually share the BC codes of together.

If one of the users tested positive for COVID-19, they would enter a special code that was included in the application by health officials. The app will then upload the entire BC code history repository of positive people, to notify every other user who has previously exchanged BC codes with them, within a specified period of time, possibly is 14 days.

[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 5.

Advocates of Bluetooth tracking technology claim that it is both more secure and more accurate than using GPS coordinates.

Theoretically, Bluetooth can identify a person you’ve been sitting next to for an hour, on a train last Monday, if the person later tests positive for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the GPS signal will likely equate all those on the train that have been in contact with positive patients, and calculate their risk is the same.

“With Bluetooth, proximity can be approximated by reduced signal strength by obstructions such as walls; therefore, it more accurately reflects close contact in high-risk environments such as: inside buildings and vehicles like planes and subways, “the team at Covid Watch wrote.

They will work with Google and Apple, the companies behind the world’s two largest mobile platforms, to plan API releases next month, allowing these Bluetooth-based applications to be available on both platforms. iOS and Android. This will also ensure that two users of different contact tracking applications can still sync data with each other.

The ultimate goal, what both technology giants call “Phase II “, will eliminate the need for an application. Instead, participants will be able to receive automatic notifications on their phones, with the software built right into the operating system.

This is a move that can help to fully implement contact tracking through Bluetooth technology on about 3 billion mobile devices today.

[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 6.
[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 7.

However, some critics argue that Bluetooth is a relatively old technology and has many shortcomings. It can also yield false positives or be easily hacked. Another barrier comes from the deployment process. How useful would this app be, if only a portion of the population installed it?

According to the publisher of Trace Together in Singapore, only 20% of the country’s population has downloaded and used Trace Together. Meanwhile, the rate needed for it to create efficiency is 60%.

Even the most sophisticated digital tracking application will not help much if smartphone users do not download it. If not installed widely, applications cannot collect enough data. whether or not to allow contact tracking to work, “the NIH Director, Dr. Francis Collins noted in a blog post.

That’s why it’s no surprise that the technology developers behind Safe Paths, Covid Watch and the PEPP-PT platform all applaud Google and Apple for their API usage plan. This means that almost all future smartphone devices will be automatically set to track users.

NHS said it plans to integrate Google and Apple APIs in its contact tracking app in the UK. Chris Boos from the PEPP-PT project told Reuters that this would allow shortening the path to the final destination. Meanwhile, Covid Watch CEO Tina White called Google and Apple participation meaningful to change the game.

[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 8.
[Infographic] Công nghệ Bluetooth đang được sử dụng để xác định nguy cơ lây nhiễm COVID-19 của bạn như thế nào? - Ảnh 9.

The commitment of Google and Apple will create the platform to legalize management activities according to the contact mark. Both technology giants have agreed to release their API only to government agencies and public health agencies.

State and local governments will work with platforms like Safe Paths, Covid Watch and Seattle, CoEpi to release app versions in their regions. That way, the market won’t be saturated by third-party contact tracking apps.

Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, who leads the Safe Path development team, welcomed the involvement of Google and Apple. But he also warned that exposure tracking is only a small part of a larger set of digital solutions that public health officials need to build.

It is important that we do not expect too much of it,” Raskar wrote in an email to Quartz.

In addition to tracking contacts, mobile app developers are going into many other areas, such as building apps that verify a person’s well-being, and creating immune certificates for surname.

Exposure tracking is only a small part of the public health solutions we need to develop [to cope with the current and future COVID-19 pandemic] ,” Raskar wrote.

Refer to Qz

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Source : Genk