BECT: Beacon-based Contact Tracing for Detecting Direct & Indirect Contacts

Digital Contact tracing with smartphone apps may help control the spread of serious pathogens, such as COVID-19. Such apps typically use peer-to-peer Bluetooth data transfer to record a contact. However, they suffer from low adoption rates, high false alarm contact indications, battery drain, and user privacy concerns. This paper proposes BECT or BEacon-based Contact Tracing, a contact tracing framework using static Bluetooth beacon devices installed in public or private places that periodically broadcast packets to nearby users that are stored as coins. Users that are positively diagnosed submit their coin IDs to a third-party service (e.g., local health authority) which can mark these coins as infected and disseminate them to other users. A match between a user's stored coins and an infected coin implies that the user has come in direct or indirect contact with an infected person. The BECT framework does not expose users' private data and conserves the device battery. We use MATLAB simulations to compare the performance of the BECT framework to phone-phone apps in a restaurant scenario and show that BECT has superior contact tracing performance. We also provide general deployment guidelines.