Abstract
We report on the results of a Covid-19 contact tracing app measurement study carried out on a standard design of European commuter tram. Our measurements indicate that in the tram there is little correlation between Bluetooth received signal strength and distance between handsets. We applied the detection rules used by the Italian, Swiss and German apps to our measurement data and also characterised the impact on performance of changes in the parameters used in these detection rules. We find that the Swiss and German detection rules trigger no exposure notifications on our data, while the Italian detection rule generates a true positive rate of 50% and a false positive rate of 50%. Our analysis indicates that the performance of such detection rules is similar to that of triggering notifications by randomly selecting from the participants in our experiments, regardless of proximity.
Highlights
There is currently a great deal of interest in the use of mobile apps to facilitate Covid-19 contact tracing, see e.g. [1,2,3]
Contact tracing apps based on the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) API [4] are currently being rolled out across Europe, with apps already deployed in Italy, Switzerland and Germany
The GAEN API is implemented on Apple iOS devices, but Apple have severely limited the ability of testers to make measurements
Summary
There is currently a great deal of interest in the use of mobile apps to facilitate Covid-19 contact tracing, see e.g. [1,2,3]. Contact tracing apps based on the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) API [4] are currently being rolled out across Europe, with apps already deployed in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. These apps use Bluetooth received signal strength to estimate proximity and will likely be used as an adjunct to existing manual contact tracing and test systems. More difficult is to identify people travelling on public transport with whom an infected person has been in contact, since the identities of these people are usually not known to the infected person and are generally not otherwise recorded. Public transport is potentially an important use case where effective contact tracing apps may be of significant assistance in infection control
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