Bandara Eranga, Liang Xueping, Foytik Peter, Shetty Sachin, Hall Crissie, Bowden Daniel, Ranasinghe Nalin, De Zoysa Kasun
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA.
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA.
Inf Process Manag. 2021 Jul;58(4):102572. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102572. Epub 2021 Mar 12.
The spread of the COVID-19 virus continues to increase fatality rates and exhaust the capacity of healthcare providers. Efforts to prevent transmission of the virus among humans remains a high priority. The current efforts to quarantine involve social distancing, monitoring and tracking the infected patients. However, the spread of the virus is too rapid to be contained only by manual and inefficient human contact tracing activities. To address this challenge, we have developed Connect, a blockchain empowered digital contact tracing platform that can leverage information on positive cases and notify people in their immediate proximity which would thereby reduce the rate at which the infection could spread. This would particularly be effective if sufficient people use the platform and benefit from the targeted recommendations. The recommendations would be made in a privacy-preserving fashion and contain the spread of the virus without the need for an extended period of potential lockdown. Connect is an identity wallet platform which will keep user digital identities and user activity trace data on a blockchain platform using Self-Sovereign Identity(SSI) proofs. User activities include the places he/she has travelled, the country of origin he/she came from, travel and dispatch updates from the airport etc. With these activity trace records, Connect platform can easily identify suspected patients who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus and take precautions before spreading it. By storing digital identities and activity trace records on blockchain-based SSI platform, Connect addresses the common issues in centralized cloud-based storage platforms (e.g. lack of data immutability, lack of traceability).
新冠病毒的传播持续提高死亡率，并使医疗服务提供者不堪重负。防止该病毒在人群中传播的工作仍然是重中之重。当前的隔离措施包括保持社交距离、监测和追踪感染患者。然而，病毒传播速度太快，仅靠人工且效率低下的接触者追踪活动无法控制。为应对这一挑战，我们开发了Connect，这是一个由区块链赋能的数字接触者追踪平台，它可以利用阳性病例信息并通知附近的人，从而降低感染传播速度。如果有足够多的人使用该平台并受益于针对性建议，这将特别有效。这些建议将以保护隐私的方式给出，遏制病毒传播，而无需长期实施潜在的封锁措施。Connect是一个身份钱包平台，它将使用自我主权身份（SSI）证明在区块链平台上保存用户数字身份和用户活动追踪数据。用户活动包括其去过的地方、来自的原籍国、机场的旅行和出发更新等。通过这些活动追踪记录，Connect平台可以轻松识别可能感染新冠病毒的疑似患者，并在传播之前采取预防措施。通过将数字身份和活动追踪记录存储在基于区块链的SSI平台上，Connect解决了集中式云存储平台中的常见问题（如缺乏数据不可变性、缺乏可追溯性）。
