MobiHealth News April 9, 2020
The in-development system foregoes GPS tracking and other identifying data collection methods in its effort to automate labor-intensive COVID-19 contact tracing.
A research effort based out of MIT is looking to individuals’ smartphones as tools for automatic COVID-19 contact tracing, but it’s taking a unique approach that doesn’t log GPS data or other potentially identifying information.
Rather, the multi-organization Private Automatic Contact Tracing (PACT) team is turning to smartphones’ Bluetooth functionality – or more specifically, the short-range data strings known as “chirps” that smartphones regularly emit to connect with other devices.
By downloading a PACT app, individuals enable their phone to continuously send out these random data strings and keep a log of those from other participating devices it has...
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