OAKLAND, California: A global race is on to develop smartphone apps and other types of mobile phone surveillance systems to track and contain the ...
OAKLAND, California: A global race is on to develop smartphone apps and other types of mobile phone surveillance systems to track and contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Smartphones can also be used to take surveys of people about their health via messaging, record their health histories via various forms of data entry and even produce a health"score" based on a combination of location information and health data.Using Bluetooth, smartphones can log other phones they have been near. If someone becomes infected, there is a ready list of their prior encounters. Phones on the list would get push notifications urging them to get tested or self-isolate.
Bluetooth also remains more accurate than GPS or cell tower location data, which can wrongly associate everyone on a busy city block as contacts.Singapore pioneered contact tracing via Bluetooth with an app called"TraceTogether." Israel, which made headlines by employing its powerful government surveillance system to track cases, has also rolled out an app called The Shield. India also has an app.
The United States government has yet to promote an app, but at least two university research groups and one ad-hoc software development are trying to gain endorsements from state and local bodies.The two companies said they were concerned about competing approaches and agreed to develop tools, to be released in May, that will enable apps to"handshake" with one other. They also address battery drain and other issues that have limited the utility of some early apps.
The tools coming from Google and Apple keep names off contact lists and secret to everyone involved, which has drawn plaudits from privacy experts. Only governments, which must verify that people who say they tested positive for coronavirus actually did so, would know the identity of disease carriers, and even they would not have access to the contact lists.
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