A research group at Kitami Institute of Technology, the University of Tokyo, and the Life Sciences Integrated Database Center proposes a new contact confirmation technology that reduces the risk of spreading infection using mobile phones.The research results were published in "IEEE Access" magazine with a privacy-friendly system.
At the time of the pandemic of the new Corona, the government released COCOA, a contact confirmation application that uses the short-range wireless technology "Bluetooth".However, there are many problems such as "it does not work unless the utilization rate increases", "only a part of the infection can be detected", "the number of false detections occurs frequently", and "the burden on the health center increases".
In a method called CIRCLE proposed by the research group, public health authorities conclude a confidentiality agreement with a mobile phone company and provide anonymized patient behavior history.Contact the mobile operator if the inhabitants are concerned about infection.The mobile phone company calculates the presence or absence of contact using the location information history of the user's mobile phone and the patient behavior history, and returns only the result to the user.If there is a high possibility of infection, contact the health center and take measures such as medical examinations and tests.This makes it possible to notify local residents of the risk of infection while giving consideration to privacy.
This method has many advantages over the Bluetooth method, but there is a problem that when the location information history of the mobile phone is rough, many residents who are not actually in contact are judged to be at risk of infection.In this paper, we have shown that it is possible to perform highly accurate contact risk calculation while controlling the cost required for calculation by combining contact risk calculations with different characteristics.
Further research and development is required to apply the research results shown in the paper adopted this time to actual infectious disease control, but future development is expected as a new technology that overcomes the problems of the Bluetooth type contact confirmation application. Will be done.
Paper information:[IEEE Access] Computation of Infection Risk via Confidential Locational Entries: A precedent approach for contact tracing with privacy protection
