The National Science Foundation (NSF) https://nsf.gov has awarded a one year Rapid Response Research (RAPID) NSF Grant for $120,000, to enable engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) https://www.wpi.edu and Virginia Tech https://vt.edu, to collaborate on a smartphone app to help conduct contact tracing to contain the spread of COVID-19.
“Typically, contact tracing is a manual process with public health workers interviewing an infected person’s close contacts. We can make that process easier, faster, and more efficient if we supplement manual contact tracing by digitally obtaining accurate and pinpointed contact information,” said Patrick Schaumont, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI and Co-Principal Investigator on the project.
With a background in security and privacy research reports, he said, “It’s possible to use smartphones as contact tracing tools without compromising privacy.” With $40,000 of the NSF grant award, he will focus on finding, testing, and implementing digital technologies that will enable private and secure smartphone contact tracing.
Patrick Schaumont along with Yaling Yang, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, are working together to develop the contact tracing app and the resulting technologies will be open-source to enable researchers and developers to build the app into their own solutions.
Much of the research will focus on the use of encryption and cryptography so only authorized parties can understand the information in order to protect the information collected by the smartphone app.
Researchers are also investigating best practice and polices that will help shape what kind of data the contact tracing app will collect, how the information will be collected, how the app will protect the user’s identity, and how and when the information will be released to public health officials.
The app will use a range of technologies, including GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. This combination of technologies will help track the user’s exact location, as well as close encounters between contact tracing app users. A prototype contact tracing app has been created so now Yaling Yang is testing the app’s ability to track close contacts and be able to share that data without releasing the user’s identity.