Digital Contact Tracing for Safe Return to Work: A comparison of various solutions in the Market

Summary

As businesses and schools reopen amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we need to ensure the safety of returning employees, customers, students, etc. The businesses and schools have implemented a combination of prevention and intervention plans. The prevention plan consists of enforcing the use of masks, social distancing, and deep sanitization. The intervention plan consists of the use of manual contact tracing by safety officers and the human resource team. Unfortunately, just masks, social distancing, sanitization, and manual contact tracing are not sufficient for safe return to work. At workplaces often people forget to wear a mask. At many workplaces, it is difficult to follow social distancing etiquette because of the nature of work. Similarly, deep sanitization is no more effective after 10s of people have used the conference rooms and restroom. The fourth line of defense, which is the most important among all, contact tracing is unfortunately prone to human error and limitations on human memory, which makes it difficult to manage the spread of COVID-19 in case of an infection. Here we present an overview of several IoT based digital PPEs that encourage social distancing and contact tracing more reliable.

Why do we need digital PPEs?

COVID-19 pandemic grew from a handful of cases to more than a million in a matter of months. The entire world was under lockdown, and people were wearing masks, and yet 5 million people fell sick and 0.5 million people died. One of the reasons we could not control the spread of pandemic is that the COVID-19 virus is infectious to an extent that the slightest amount of human error can result in the massive spread. One of the recent surveys, conducted by Data studio, found that as many as 40% of people leave home for work, and among them, as many as 31% do not wear masks all the time either because they find it uncomfortable or forget the pandemic social etiquettes. Similarly, 38% of people are not following social distancing etiquettes, one of the prime reasons (20%) workplaces are not able to enforce or support social distancing practice.

On June 26, during his daily briefing, White House Health Advisor Dr. Fauci commented that contact tracing was not going well, and that led to a massive outbreak. This survey combined with Dr. Fauci’s assessment underscores why just masks, sanitation, and conventional contact tracing are not sufficient for safe return to work. That is why the use of digital PPEs (Personal Protective Equipments) is important. The digital PPEs involve the use of highly precise network protocols to (a) give social distancing alerts to people (b) remind pandemic etiquettes for example use of masks and sanitization © facilitate accurate and error-free contact tracing. The technology ensures safety at a large scale and gives a comprehensive safety net of keeping COVID infection spread at bay.

Fig-1: On June 26, during his daily briefing, White House Health Advisor Dr. Fauci, commented that contact tracing was not going well, and that led to a massive outbreak.

Both false positives and false negatives have serious issues. A false positive causes undue stress- imagine if one falsely diagnoses or predicts that you might have COVID! Besides that, every false positive can potentially cause an employer a direct loss of 15 days x$100/day= $1500. If you add the cost of hiring the replacement for a COVID suspect and other administrative costs, the overall cost of false positive is more than $5000. A false negative can be even more disastrous. If your safety manager is not able to trace the COVID positive person sooner than later, it can result in months-long shutting down of plants, and potentially a massive lawsuit. That is why the use of digital PPEs is important. It provides the security much needed amid this ongoing pandemic.

What are the options for digital contact tracing?

IoT technology is an excellent way to digitize and supplement the conventional contact tracing process. There are two different kinds of IoT solutions when it comes to contact tracing: (a) BLE based (b) Ultra Wide Band based. The BLE based method uses BLE protocols to determine the relative locations of two beacons. These beacons can be standalone BLE tags with inbuilt alert features such as Estimo or phones’ inbuilt beacon. The two smartphone OS companies google and apple rolled out a framework called exposure notification to empower BLE based contact tracing solutions. These BLE beacon-based solutions are relatively cheap and easy to manage, but are prone to error, and have serious privacy concerns. The location estimated using BLE beacons can off by as much as 2 m. Since the social distance suggested by CDC is 6 ft (1.8 m), the BLE beacons give erroneous results, false-positive as well as false-negative. One of the experiments done at our lab, we found that a beacon-based social distancing solution gave wrong alerts 75% of the time! The beacons were giving false positives even when the tags were at a 10 ft or farther distance!

Ultra-Wideband technology (UWB) is a radio technology that uses a low energy level for short-range, high-bandwidth communications over the radio spectrum (3.1 to 10.6 GHz). [5] The UWB technology can be used to determine spatial parameters such as distance and location with high accuracy, the error is as low as 10 cm. Thanks to wide range frequency, UWB has a smaller likelihood of noise interference which makes it apt for indoor application. For social distancing and contact tracing technology in an office or factory environment, we want an IoT technology that can reliably communicate in an indoor setting and can determine distance and location with high precision. Thus UWB has turned out to be an excellent solution for social distancing and contact tracing.

Price Comparison: Phone Apps, BLE beacons and UWB tags

The social distancing and contact tracing solutions are cheap- as low as $100/user. If you look at the risk of an outbreak of COVID-19 infection at a workplace, and the potential cost of quarantining infected employees, $100/user is negligible. Often an office pays way more than that for coffee and snack supply.

Table 1: Selected few contact-tracing and social distancing solutions that are based on BLE beacons.

Table 2: Selected few contact-tracing and social distancing apps which use in-built BLE and GPS of the phone.

Table 3: Selected few contact-tracing and social distancing technology solutions based on UWB technology

Performance Comparison: Phone Apps, BLE beacons and Iterate Lab’s COVID-safe platform

As you can see from the charts above, there are many options available on the market ranging in price and accuracy. Choosing a provider means putting your faith in their technology and ability to deliver accurate results. Our research has shown that although BLE devices are more cost-effective to build, they are not as reliable as solutions built with UWB. There are two major challenges. Firstly, BLE based solutions are inaccurate and give both false positives and negatives. Secondly, there are serious privacy concerns about phone-based apps. The COVID-exposure APIs rolled out by Apple and Google in the month of, once hailed by everyone, never took off. One of the studies suggested that Americans don’t trust contact tracing apps.

With that in mind, our team at Iterate Labs designed COVID-safe [4]. COVID-safe is a contact tracing and location awareness solution for enterprises that consists of a UWB based device for accuracy and easy to use software dashboard. The solution is in the same price range of BLE based solutions. The beauty of this solution is that it does not track location and respects the privacy of users. The workflow and use case of COVID-safe were designed with CDC guidelines in mind, and based on inputs from several professionally trained contact tracers. Please find our white paper on Open call for designing privacy-protective and human-centered contact tracing tools. [4] Our devices -when tested-demonstrated tremendous accuracy and precision. The results are summarized below in table 3 and 4.

Get A Demo

We are very proud to release the COVID-safe software that works with a wide range of solutions including one from AME. The COVID-safe solution is enabling universities, offices, and factories to bring their employees safely to work. Our UWB based solution has been widely successful with customers looking to quickly and easily implement contact tracing protocols. If you want to check our software please visit:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apoorvakiran_reopenamerica-reopeningschools-returntoworksafely-ugcPost-6694698836331393024-xXhJ

The solution developed by AME comes in two versions. The first plain vanilla version gives social distancing alerts whereas the second called the Plus version gives social distancing alerts with contact tracing. Please find more details: https://www.ameol.it/en/egopro-social-distancing-covid-19/

Figure 2. COVID-safe platform. The tags use UWB based chips from AME. They give light and haptic feedback if users are within 6 ft of social distance. They also register the IDs of tags they come into contact with. The contact tracing and social distancing data can be seamlessly downloaded and stored in the cloud using a gateway. The software dashboard gives an easy and proactive way to safeguard the workplace against the COVID-19 outbreak.

All the BLE based apps and beacon performed very poorly. There is a reason why the governments stopped talking about phone-based contact tracing after some time. The BLE based location is erroneous because of the limitations of BLE4.0. A summary of the findings is presented below.

Table 1. This table shows the comparison of performance by various BLE beacons and Phone apps.

All the tags performed very well with precision as little as 10 cm. The UWB based localization and contact tracing are very accurate and precise because of the large swatch of the spectrum it operates in. A summary of the findings is presented below.

Table 2. This table shows the comparison of performance by various UWB tags.

Firstly COVID-safe modifies the user behavior to instill appropriate pandemic etiquettes. It reminds people to use facemasks, sanitizes locations and objects around them, and maintain social distance with surrounding people. Secondly, it reduces the number of contacts made at the workplace by giving social distancing alerts. Thirdly it facilitates accurate and precise contact tracing in case of an unwanted event.

Table 4: A summary of how COVID-safe proactively safeguards employees and students from COVID-19. Essentially COVID-safe benefits in 3 ways.

Conclusion

COVID pandemic grows at an exponential rate. We have observed that masks, sanitation, social distancing, and contact tracing are not very effective because of the human error involved. To be able to reopen businesses safely we must make these 4 pandemic protocols: social distancing, masks, sanitization, and contact tracing foolproof by using IoT based digital PPEs. The use of digital PPEs dramatically reduces the number of social contacts, reminds users of social etiquettes amid pandemic, encourages people to wear masks, and follows proper sanitization protocols. The use of digital PPEs also makes contact tracing accurate and fool-proof. Among all the digital PPEs for COVID-19 available, UWB based solutions are the most accurate and precise. The use of Iterate Lab’s COVID-safe platform reduces unnecessary social contacts by as much as 60% and increases the use of masks and sanitizers by 10%. This demonstrates that digital PPEs can help us reopen the economy safely amid ongoing pandemic.

Disclaimer: Being a follower of ‘The IoT Magazine’ offers lots of perks :) A consultation session with experts from across the industries is a major one. Submit your query here and we will connect you with the right IoT experts. He might be sitting next door, you never know.

References:

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenge-of-contact-tracing-in-america-11590706909
2. A new survey reveals the reasons why Americans choose not to wear masks. Tammy Mutasa, https://komonews.com/
3. https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/1RX1twzFniNjjOqd_HzuSqS_05rYD0zYH/page/i58TB
4. https://uxdesign.cc/open-call-for-designing-privacy-protective-and-human-centered-contact-tracing-tools-f0a12351138d
5. https://theiotmagazine.com/ultra-wideband-technology-f9ba3d7e04c8
6. https://www.ameol.it/en/egopro-social-distancing-covid-19/