The Viral App

Inspiration

There is currently a global outbreak of a new Coronavirus, Covid-19. New outbreaks are closely monitored by local governments and authorities in order to try to prevent further spread. Contact tracing is a key part of this where the health authorities ask the newly diagnosed patients who they have been in contact with for the last few weeks, however this is often incomplete as individuals cannot name strangers that they have had close contact with whilst in public places or at events. We believe Bluetooth technologies have great potential to help with contact tracing and help to anonymously alert people to possible disease exposure.

What it does

Every phone with Bluetooth will have a unique Bluetooth MAC code that it broadcasts publicly. Our app will able to log all the nearby Bluetooth MAC codes that are being broadcasted and measure the duration and signal strength of these devices, creating an anonymous log of the people that you have been around. The app will also create an anonamous private ID for the user which it will use later to check for exposure. Signal strength has been shown to be correlated to distance so proximity can then be estimated from this. If you become infected then you can transfer this data set to Public Health England who can then assess which Bluetooth MAC addresses are most at risk and upload the corresponding Private IDs to a server along with an advisory message. The app on an individuals phone will periodically check this server for a message for their Private ID and if it fins one it will send the user a notification with advice from PHE, eg: to reduce public interactions and call a number quoting a reference code for further information and to organise testing if necessary.

How we built it

For our prototype we used an existing app that logs all the Bluetooth MAC codes that you come into contact with and exported this as a .sqlite file. We then uploaded this file to a server that the phone app can periodically check for its own MAC code and send the user a warning notification if it finds it.

Challenges we ran into

As we had no data security expertise so decided to make the prototype just use the MAC code as ID instead of using a corresponding Private ID as we would need to do in the finished app for extra security and privacy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a design that preserves the anonymity of the users throughout so that even if the server is compromised, the most information that people will have leaked will be a random Bluetooth MAC address that is already public anyway. Also we are proud of making a working prototype that can detect and use real life Bluetooth MAC addresses and also an app that can query a database in realtime and even notify the user if there is a match.