Overall system

Exploring the full landscape

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Our scope is the contribution of mobile technology available to citizens (iOS and Android equipped smartphones) to the prevention of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The System under study is thus the sum of components that interplay in the prevention :

• The citizen equipped with a smartphone, having encounters with other persons, doing visits to points of interest, making movements and showing symptoms.
• The healthcare system including health authorities, testing facilities, healthcare providers, epidemiologists, contact tracers
• Academic researchers
• Policy makers
• Social support providers (in charge of organising social-economical aspects of isolation and quarantining)
• Users of other similar systems

The goals of the system are:

• As a whole: to limit the combined health and economical damage caused by the pandemic
• As means to this end:
  • Empower citizens to take effective and more targeted social distancing measures (ref: EC Recommendation of 8.4.2020), including informing users of increased potential exposure and advising them on adequate measures, supporting their relationship with healthcare providers.
  • Support contact tracing at scale (ref: EC Recommendation of 8.4.2020), which we extend to ‘transmission tracing’ to encompass explicitly all transmission routes beyond person-to-person contacts.
  • Inform policy makers on measures and exit strategy (ref: EC Recommendation of 8.4.2020) through spatio-temporal analysis of data on spread and impact of the virus.
  • Assess the effectiveness of measures
  • Optimize resource allocation (e.g. testing) and utilization (e.g. triage) in order to avoid overburdening the healthcare system and yield the maximal impact of available resources
  • Support the organizing of effective isolation of infected individuals and quarantining of suspected infections, including the social-economical aspects
  • Enable scientific research on the pandemic and the fight against the pandemic
• We explicitly exclude law enforcement and mass surveillance.

This requires the following features:

Inform citizens:

• General preventive guidelines and warnings
• Targeted preventive guidelines and warnings
• Information about the status of the pandemic
• Information about the measures and policies

Support transmission tracing(*)

• Processes:
  • Identify and isolate infected individuals (index cases)
  • Track encounters of the index cases in order to quarantine them awaiting testing according to a monitoring protocol (building contact graphs and backtracking the index case’s contacts)
  • Identify visits to points of interest and movements of the index cases
  • Identify hotspots (indicators for environmental transmission or unidentified encounters) based on the correlation of visits to points of interest or locations with infection incidence
  • Identify the ‘most central individual’ in a network so as to target tests for maximal network coverage
  • Identify super spreaders
  • Provide warnings and instructions (isolation, quarantining, testing)

Support healthcare provisioning:

• Pre-disease self-diagnosing (e.g. health / symptoms diary)
• Preparing a doctor’s visit (e.g. pre-anamnesis / medical history / triage)
• Post-diagnosis contact on treatment and symptoms evolution

Inform policy making:

• Provide aggregated dashboards of relevant indicators
• Model and predict the evolution of the disease based on spatio-temporal mapping of symptoms and infections based on monitoring of consenting individuals of their (para-)medical data and location and movements

Monitor the effectiveness of decision-making by authorities on measures such as social distancing and confinement

• Correlate spatio-temporal symptom and infection mapping with measures taken

Optimize resource allocation

• Targeted testing
• Capture and consolidate information
• Efficient use of contact tracers (and thus reduce the amount of people needed)

Organize quarantining

• Certify infection and exposure data
• Support appropriate information exchange between actors (index case, employer, care givers, healthcare providers, social security)

Enable research

• Conduct surveys among the population
• Provide adequately protected data

(*) We choose the term ‘transmission tracing’ rather than ‘contact tracing’ in order to explicitly include transmission modes beyond person-to-person transmission.

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