Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Signal Strength Estimation to Facilitate Contact Tracing for COVID-19

Abstract

The process of contact tracing to reduce the spread of highly infectious and life-threatening diseases has traditionally been a primarily manual process managed by public health entities. This process becomes challenged when faced with a pandemic of the proportions of SARS-CoV2. Digital contact tracing has been proposed as way to augment manual contact tracing and lends itself to widely proliferated devices such as cell phones and wearables. This paper describes a method and analysis of determining whether two cell phones, carried by humans, were in persistent contact of no more than 6 feet over 15 minutes using Bluetooth Low Energy signals. The paper describes the approach to detecting these signals, as well as a data-driven performance analysis showing that larger numbers of samples coupled with privacy preserving auxiliary information improves detection performance.

arXiv comment12 pages, 13 figures, 1 table

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• CoAvoid: Secure, Privacy-Preserved Tracing of Contacts for Infectious Diseases
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• SonicPACT: An Ultrasonic Ranging Method for the Private Automated Contact Tracing (PACT) Protocol
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