TANG | Devpost

Inspiration

We recognized that there is an issue on our campus of providing quick and reliable contact tracing information. Within just one month of moving back to our University of Dayton campus, over 15% of undergraduate students were diagnosed with COVID-19 and it was not until recently that our school was able to stabilize to a localized outbreak status.

Since students can only notify the individuals they are knowingly in contact with, there are many opportunities for errors in the process of contact tracing.

What it does

TANG collaborates with RFID sensors by passing along a hashed ID unique to each user to the sensor. The sensor then sends this information, along with the time and location, to a central database that stores the information. Then, when a user tests positive for COVID-19, the user will be able to upload their results to their health-care provider (or a certified third-party verifier), which will in turn pass along the verified results back to the central database. Then, the database will send a push notification to anyone who was in the same place at the same time, saying that they could have possibly come in contact with someone with COVID-19.

Due to using RFID technology at specified locations, the accuracy of this method would only be feasible for close-quarters locations. However, this can easily be implemented with businesses, universities, and other locations that already have RFID access methods, such as smart cards, badges, and other tokens. These locations would likely have their own sub-system of TANG for data-security purposes, but the end-result would still be the same.

How I built it

We made our own RFID sensor by using an Arduino equipped with various plugins. Google Firebase was used to store the location, hashed ID, and time data in the cloud.