Contact Tracing Application Research Articles

A Review of the Aarogya Setu Digital Contact Tracing Mobile Application of the Government of India in Response to the Novel Corona Virus [COVID-19]: A Local and International Perspective

This paper reviews the Government of India’s initiative to battle the Novel Coronavirus: the release of the ‘Aarogya Setu’ digital contact tracing technology mobile application in an epidemiological context with a purpose to increase awareness of the safety precautions required to stay safe as well as to inform the application users in case they have been in close interaction with a COVID positive patient in the past few days and advises them to take the necessary precautions if needed. The Aarogya Setu application helps to track the rapid cluster and community spread of COVID-19 in India and achieves this by utilising a client-server model-based architecture involving communication from a central government database to users’ devices using GPS and Bluetooth features for data collection and dissemination to devices.Other initiatives of digital contact tracing technologies are reviewed as well, most notably Google and Apple’s provision of an application programming interface to developers worldwide which allows data capture of interactions from users’ devices.Suggestions are given to monitor and improve the security of the application due to possible misuse of users’ data and hacking by cyber criminals. Privacy suggestions have been highlighted as well such as alternatives of removing location tracking via GPS while still providing the benefits of contact tracing by using Bluetooth. Mobile application development issues are suggested such as to allow users to add their personal risk factors such as co-morbidities to get a risk factor scale in their device locally to alert the user of their risk of infection of the novel coronavirus in case they were or have come in contact with people who tested positive while keeping the information private to the user. With the rapid advancements in technology, India has the potential to make their contact tracing application even better on a large scale with enhanced usage and efficacy going forward in the battle against COVID-19.

Evaluating How Smartphone Contact Tracing Technology Can Reduce the Spread of Infectious Diseases: The Case of COVID-19.

Detecting and controlling the diffusion of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 is crucial to managing epidemics. One common measure taken to contain or reduce diffusion is to detect infected individuals and trace their prior contacts so as to then selectively isolate any individuals likely to have been infected. These prior contacts can be traced using mobile devices such as smartphones or smartwatches, which can continuously collect the location and contacts of their owners by using their embedded localisation and communications technologies, such as GPS, Cellular networks, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of these technologies and determines the impact of contact tracing precision on the spread and control of infectious diseases. To this end, we have created an epidemic model that we used to evaluate the efficiency and cost (number of people quarantined) of the measures to be taken, depending on the smartphone contact tracing technologies used. Our results show that in order to be effective for the COVID-19 disease, the contact tracing technology must be precise, contacts must be traced quickly, and a significant percentage of the population must use the smartphone contact tracing application. These strict requirements make smartphone-based contact tracing rather ineffective at containing the spread of the infection during the first outbreak of the virus. However, considering a second wave, where a portion of the population will have gained immunity, or in combination with some other more lenient measures, smartphone-based contact tracing could be extremely useful.

Use of a mobile application for Ebola contact tracing and monitoring in northern Sierra Leone: a proof-of-concept study

BackgroundThe 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was the largest Ebola epidemic to date. Contact tracing was a core surveillance activity. Challenges with paper-based contact tracing systems include incomplete identification of contacts, delays in communication and response, loss of contact lists, inadequate data collection and transcription errors.The aim of this study was to design and evaluate an electronic system for tracing contacts of Ebola cases in Port Loko District, Sierra Leone, and to compare this with the existing paper-based system. The electronic system featured data capture using a smartphone application, linked to an alert system to notify the District Ebola Response Centre of symptomatic contacts.MethodsThe intervention was a customised three-tier smartphone application developed using Dimagi’s CommCare platform known as the Ebola Contact Tracing application (ECT app). Eligible study participants were all 26 Contact Tracing Coordinators (CTCs) and 86 Contact Tracers (CTs) working in the 11 Chiefdoms of Port Loko District during the study period (April–August 2015). Case detection was from 13th April to 17th July 2015. The CTCs and their CTs were provided with smartphones installed with the ECT app which was used to conduct contact tracing activities. Completeness and timeliness of contact tracing using the app were compared with data from April 13th-June 7th 2015, when the standard paper-based system was used.ResultsFor 25 laboratory-confirmed cases for whom paper-based contact tracing was conducted, data for only 39% of 408 contacts were returned to the District, and data were often incomplete. For 16 cases for whom app-based contact tracing was conducted, 63% of 556 contacts were recorded as having been visited on the app, and the median recorded duration from case confirmation to first contact visit was 70 h.ConclusionThere were considerable challenges to conducting high-quality contact tracing in this setting using either the paper-based or the app-based system. However, the study demonstrated that it was possible to implement mobile health (mHealth) in this emergency setting. The app had the benefits of improved data completeness, storage and accuracy, but the challenges of using an app in this setting and epidemic context were substantial.