Social Distance Guard - Social distancing alarm and privacy-oritented backtracking

Full version of the below summary is to be found in the project proposal document

Purpose

• Identify and trace close contacts of positive Coronavirus cases to stop the spread of infection.
• Maintain the new culture of social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Problem

• The need for a tool to encourage social distancing in public spaces, and enforce it inside facilities. 
•  To stop the virus’ spread, health officials need to find and isolate contacts of infected people quickly to prevent further infection. Backtracing positive cases contacts proved effective and was used by some countries.
• Bactracing system is particularly important in: 
  • Slowing spread in places at earlier stages of the outbreak. 
  • Protecting vital sectors that have to stay running during lockdown 
  • preventing 2nd outbreak as the lockdown measures are gradually decreased.
• Since backtracking can involve collecting personal data, the need emerges for an alternative to location tracking solutions, namely a less invasive monitoring system.

One idea this project trying to implement is to mimic virus spread to collect information and send them only whenever necessary and as much as necessary.

Solution

A mobile app that creates a virtual ring to monitor personal space.

• A smartphone app will monitor personal distance (1~1.5m diameter circle) using a proximity technology that is widely adopted and suitable for target range.
• If interference occurs, the App will record the contact and notify both users to keep their personal distance similar to car parking sensors.
• In case the user is tested positive all individuals in such list will be automatically backtraced to their contact method (e.g. phone number) and notified instantly to start a self-isolation procedure, the list will also be broadcasted to health authorities which in turn can take necessary actions. all with proper data disclosure consent taken from the users before every step.

Technical Solution

Using Beacon technology to detect proximity of two smartphones, each smartphone will act as a low energy bluetooth (BLE) beacon that broadcast signals and recieve signals from other smartphones. comparing signal strength to a refrence signal strength indicator (RSSI) and applying proper noise filtering and error reductions techniques, an approximate value of the distance between the two (or more) smartphones can be obtained. this distance measure will be used against the monitoring range so that it performs a callback action in case the phones come too near for enough time.

More details of using beacon technology is to be found here.

Data protection

Making data submissions voluntary and anonymizing data are good options to maintain civil rights. It’s a clean way of legally doing it.

Similar applications

1. Private Kit released by MIT in 19/03/2020
2. TraceTogether released by Singapore government in 20/03/2020.