Abstract
With the latest standard releases, Bluetooth technology is becoming more and more relevant for building and industrial automation. At the same time, Bluetooth is now becoming fundamental for contact tracing applications, to support monitoring and containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical facilities such as nursing homes and hospitals have been severely exposed to the pandemic, but the currently available short-range wireless technology still faces the fundamental limits of proximity accuracy, battery lifetime, and privacy in those complex indoor environments. The aim of this paper is to investigate effective ways of building an architecture with heterogeneous devices to support contact tracing in critical scenarios such as healthcare facilities, while meeting the required level of accuracy and privacy. A framework based on standard Bluetooth mesh networking technology is proposed, and the research challenges are discussed.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic is having tremendous consequences on our lives and the economy
There are ongoing discussions on the effectiveness of contact tracing in large-scale scenarios, and concerns have emerged about the technology penetration, proximity accuracy, efficient use of device resources, and privacy of such solutions
Critical facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes can benefit from the deployment of simple, flexible, cost-effective, local infrastructures to support contact tracing, especially if based on a standardized networking solution
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic is having tremendous consequences on our lives and the economy. As the world was unprepared for the first wave of the pandemic, the research community has focused on how technology can better support the containment of the disease. Contact tracing is an essential component to support the early identification of new cases among the population and to contain outbreaks of the disease. There is currently a great interest in the development of mobile apps to facilitate COVID-19 contact tracing. In April 2020, Apple and Google worked together to build an opt-in and decentralized way of allowing individuals to know if they have come into contact with confirmed cases based on Bluetooth technology [1]. Apps developed for contact tracing allow a handheld device to scan for other devices in the background, storing data locally. If one has tested positive for coronavirus, the user may authorize the data to be provided to the health authorities, trace others who happened to be in proximity (e.g., spending more than 15 min within a 1 m range from the person who tested positive), and notify about the risk of exposure
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