Cancelled Submission
My hack has been picked up to aide contact tracing efforts so have to pull my submission :)
Contact Tracing
What is Contact Tracing?
Contact Tracing is the process of identifying where, when, and how a person has contracted an illness.
By tracing the origin of an infection you can better manage and direct resources and safety restrictions to mitigate further infection within a community.
How is Contact Tracing Performed?
Manually
Interviews and banking records with infected persons to help identify where they were when they contracted the illness
Security footage and receipts from businesses the person visited to identify who they may have exposed and who they contracted the illness from
This approach is being pursued by many municipalities and governments by gathering volunteers to help sift through contact data to identify who, where, and how patients have been exposed to illness.
- Highly Manual
- Error-Prone
- Unreliable Incoming Data from Patient Recollection
- Time Consuming
Automatically
A mobile application or device that enables the tracking of potential contact with others over time to indicate where, when, and from whom a person may have contracted an illness, or who they exposed.
Many countries have built, or are in the process of building, standardized contact tracing applications to automate the collection of contact data.
- Only covers direct contact
- Oftentimes violates patient privacy
- Security concerns
- Leads to ‘griefing’ businesses and individuals
- Gaps in Tracing
Apple/Google Contact Tracing API
Apple and Google are working together to create a standardized contact tracing API based on BlueTooth. However, the approach their API relies on causes gaps in data due to only triggering when people have direct contact with one another for a longer period of time. The API requires people to be within 30 feet of one another for 5 minutes to trigger a contact point.
Mixed
Device data to inform and narrow the scope of where to perform deeper analysis on to identify who else may have been infected and who the patient was infected by. By mixing both automated and manual approaches some of the issues with both can be remediated. However, it still requires a high level of manual effort and suffers from bad input data.
So What Are the Issues We Are Solving?
- Private Personal Data (S/PII)
- Ensuring HIPAA Compliance
- Ensuring PCI Compliance
- Indirect and Direct Exposure
- Griefing of Individuals and Businesses
- Personal Risk Management
- Privacy
A New Way To Trace Contact
By combining location data and Bluetooth data, with a brand-new method of tracing personal trajectory, we can fill the gaps that other approaches suffer from.
Utilizing Ray Tracing based techniques we can determine indirect contact between individuals. Ray Tracing is used in Video Games and Computer Graphics to determine how light illuminates a scene.
By utilizing the same principles that Ray Tracing uses, we can determine how much exposure people have had to one another. Even when the people have left the immediate vicinity.
This is achieved by having every individual treated as a light source. When a person moves through an area the tail of their illuminated path decays over time. As other people go through that path, they get illuminated to a degree allowing for a more holistic risk of infection to be determined.
Key Features
Managing Personal Risk
We provide a personal assessment of a user's risk of having contracted an illness based on their historical behavior.
To help ensure the user makes responsible choices we use anonymized, and partially de-localized data to indicate areas that have a higher potential risk of close contact.
Local Resources and Test Sites
It’s still difficult for people to find out the latest, accurate, information around the pandemic that is relevant to their region.
To help remediate this, local data is brought into the application from health services so people can more easily know what is going on, and where to get help or testing if it is required.
Data Management
All data is fully anonymized and can be deleted by end-users. No personally identifiable information is ever collected by the application; avoiding any potential concerns around privacy.
Take it for a Test Drive
You can play with the latest developer builds of the application through Expo on your Android devices by visiting exp://exp.host/@maartens/ctmock
Due to restrictions, Apple has imposed the iOS version is only directly accessible to team members until it is on the App Store.
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