iTrace: When IOTA Meets COVID-19 Contact Tracing

During the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity is at war with nature, which destroyed the economy globally, people have faced unmatched lockdowns, thereby resulting in an unprecedented disaster, and extraordinary situation for health service providers. Recently, the announcement of vaccines has given hope to humanity, which is time consuming. Social distancing is considered an effective solution for reducing infection, but cannot prevent the spread of infection. This is where the idea of contact tracing came into being. Another control that helps is the digital contact-tracing technique that can be achieved through smartphone applications for tracing COVID patients and alerting others through notifications. In this article, we propose a framework named iTrace that uses IOTA, which provides security, global accessibility, the privacy of individuals, and minimum resource utilization. This makes it an efficient contact-tracing technique that covers most areas and can be helpful to control the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.