Co-location epidemic tracking on London public transports using low power mobile magnetometer

The public transports provide an ideal means to enable contagious diseases transmission. This paper introduces a novel idea to detect co-location of people in such environment using just the ubiquitous geomagnetic field sensor on the smart phone. Essentially, given that all passengers must share the same journey between at least two consecutive stations, we have a long window to match the user trajectory. Our idea was assessed over a painstakingly survey of over 150 kilometres of travelling distance, covering different parts of London, using the overground trains, the underground tubes and the buses

Epidemic contact tracing with smartphone sensors

Contact tracing is widely considered as an effective procedure in the fight against epidemic diseases. However, one of the challenges for technology based contact tracing is the high number of false positives, questioning its trust-worthiness and efficiency amongst the wider population for mass adoption. To this end, this paper proposes a novel, yet practical smartphone-based contact tracing approach, employing WiFi and acoustic sound for relative distance estimate, in addition to the air pressure and the magnetic field for ambient environment matching. We present a model combining 6 smartphone sensors, prioritising some of them when certain conditions are met. We empirically verified our approach in various realistic environments to demonstrate an achievement of up to 95% fewer false positives, and 62% more accurate than Bluetooth-only system. To the best of our knowledge, this paper was one of the first work to propose a combination of smartphone sensors for contact tracing