A Bluetooth-Based Contact-Tracing Mobile App for Airborne-Based Epidemic Control

In the situation of an epidemic outbreak, a contact tracing tool is preferred to alert the infection status of daily encountered people. Since we are in the era that smartphone is carried everywhere and embedded with Bluetooth technology, a Bluetooth-based mobile app is proposed in this paper for advanced contact tracing. The proposed app can not only trace the infectious people contacted with the user but also label the danger level by scanning the proximity and lingering time for each case. It is simple yet efficient to apply as it does not employ any new Bluetooth protocol but only requires basic inputs that are acquirable from any smartphone with Bluetooth 2.0 and above. This application is built using service-oriented architecture which helps mobile devices to communicate with a data collection server as well as each other. The collected data will be shown in a web application and used to further study the propagation characteristics of new infectious viruses. It also comprises a daily survey that users answer, and which will be used by health officials for early prognosis. The app is currently tested campus-wide and showed salient features in terms of scalability, mobility, and sensing inaccuracy-proof, which has the potential to be applied in larger populations with more complicated scenarios.