Related papers: Comparing manual contact tracing and digital conta…
Many countries are currently gearing up to use smart-phone apps to perform contact tracing as part of the effort to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and prevent resurgences of the disease after the initial outbreak. With the announcement of the…
Across a plethora of social situations, we touch others in natural and intuitive ways to share thoughts and emotions, such as tapping to get one's attention or caressing to soothe one's anxiety. A deeper understanding of these…
Contact discovery allows new users of a messaging service to find existing contacts that already use that service. Existing users are similarly informed of new users that join. This creates a privacy issue: anyone already on the service…
Given their importance in shaping social networks and determining how information or diseases propagate in a population, human interactions are the subject of many data collection efforts. To this aim, different methods are commonly used,…
With more than 1.7 million COVID-19 deaths, identifying effective measures to prevent COVID-19 is a top priority. We developed a mathematical model to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic with digital contact tracing and testing strategies. The…
We analyze a Markovian SIR epidemic model where individuals either recover naturally or are diagnosed, leading to isolation and potential contact tracing. Our focus is on digital contact tracing via a tracing app, considering both its…
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bluetooth-based contact tracing has been deployed in many countries with the help of the developers of smartphone operating systems that provide APIs for privacy-preserving exposure notification.…
Data collection and processing via digital public health technologies are being promoted worldwide by governments and private companies as strategic remedies for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic and loosening lockdown measures. However, the…
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has made manual contact tracing difficult. Thus, various public health authorities have experimented with automatic contact tracing using mobile applications (or "apps"). These apps, however, have raised…
The COVID-19 crisis represents the most dangerous threat to public health since the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1918. So far, the disease due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been countered with extreme measures at national level that attempt to…
How to avoid a second wave of COVID-19 after reopening the economy is a pressing question. The extremely high basic reproductive number $R_0$ (5.7 to 6.4, shown in new studies) of SARS-CoV-2 further complicates the challenge. Here we assess…
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases…
We outline a contact-tracing strategy based on proximity sensing using mobile devices. We discuss what an ideal system should look like and what it can do. We show that, when adopted sufficiently broadly, such a contact-tracing strategy can…
Touch sensing, as a major human/machine interface, is widely used in various commercial products such as smart watches, mobile phones, tablets and TVs. State-of-the-art touch detections are mainly based on mutual capacitive sensing, which…
Verifying the correct behavior of robots in contact tasks is challenging due to model uncertainties associated with contacts. Standard methods for testing often fall short since all (uncountable many) solutions cannot be obtained. Instead,…
Digital proximity tracing (DPT) for Sars-CoV-2 pandemic mitigation is a complex intervention with the primary goal to notify app users about possible risk exposures to infected persons. Policymakers and DPT operators need to know whether…
Contact tracing apps are powerful software tools that can help control the spread of COVID-19. In this article, we evaluated 53 COVID-19 contact tracing apps found on the Google Play Store in terms of their usage, rating, access permission,…
With the hit of new pandemic threats, scientific frameworks are needed to understand the unfolding of the epidemic. The use of mobile apps that are able to trace contacts is of utmost importance in order to control new infected cases and…
Testing, contact tracing, and isolation (TTI) is an epidemic management and control approach that is difficult to implement at scale because it relies on manual tracing of contacts. Exposure notification apps have been developed to…
Contact tracing is an essential tool in slowing and containing outbreaks of contagious diseases. Current contact tracing methods range from interviews with public health personnel to Bluetooth pings from smartphones. While all methods offer…