Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Signal Strength Estimation to Facilitate Contact Tracing for COVID-19
G.F. Hatke, M. Montanari, S. Appadwedula, Michael Wentz, John Meklenburg, Louise C. Ivers, Watson, Jennifer, Paul D. Fiore · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020
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.