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.
@article{arxiv.2006.15711,
title = {Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Signal Strength Estimation to Facilitate Contact Tracing for COVID-19},
author = {Gary F. Hatke and Monica Montanari and Swaroop Appadwedula and Michael Wentz and John Meklenburg and Louise Ivers and Jennifer Watson and Paul Fiore},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.15711},
year = {2020}
}