Chowdhury Mohammad Jabed Morshed, Ferdous Md Sadek, Biswas Kamanashis, Chowdhury Niaz, Muthukkumarasamy Vallipuram
Department of Computer Science and Information TechnologyLa Trobe University Melbourne VIC 3086 Australia.
Department of Computer Science and EngineeringShahjalal University of Science and Technology Sylhet 3114 Bangladesh.
IEEE Access. 2020 Nov 9;8:225703-225729. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3036718. eCollection 2020.
Contact tracing has become a vital tool for public health officials to effectively combat the spread of new diseases, such as the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19. Contact tracing is not new to epidemiologist rather, it used manual or semi-manual approaches that are incredibly time-consuming, costly and inefficient. It mostly relies on human memory while scalability is a significant challenge in tackling pandemics. The unprecedented health and socio-economic impacts led researchers and practitioners around the world to search for technology-based approaches for providing scalable and timely answers. Smartphones and associated digital technologies have the potential to provide a better approach due to their high level of penetration, coupled with mobility. While data-driven solutions are extremely powerful, the fear among citizens is that information like location or proximity associated with other personal data can be weaponised by the states to enforce surveillance. Low adoption rate of such apps due to the lack of trust questioned the efficacy and demanded researchers to find innovative solution for building digital-trust, and appropriately balancing privacy and accuracy of data. In this paper, we have critically reviewed such protocols and apps to identify the strength and weakness of each approach. Finally, we have penned down our recommendations to make the future contact tracing mechanisms more universally inter-operable and privacy-preserving.
接触者追踪已成为公共卫生官员有效抗击新型疾病传播的重要工具，比如新型冠状病毒病COVID-19。接触者追踪对流行病学家来说并不陌生，相反，它过去采用的手动或半手动方法极其耗时、成本高昂且效率低下。它主要依赖人类记忆，而在应对大流行时，可扩展性是一个重大挑战。前所未有的健康和社会经济影响促使世界各地的研究人员和从业者寻求基于技术的方法，以提供可扩展且及时的解决方案。智能手机及相关数字技术因其高度的普及率以及移动性，有潜力提供更好的方法。虽然数据驱动的解决方案非常强大，但公民担心与其他个人数据相关的位置或接近度等信息会被政府用作实施监控的手段。由于缺乏信任，此类应用的采用率较低，这对其有效性提出了质疑，并要求研究人员找到建立数字信任的创新解决方案，以及恰当地平衡数据隐私和准确性。在本文中，我们对这些协议和应用进行了批判性审查，以确定每种方法的优缺点。最后，我们写下了我们的建议，以使未来的接触者追踪机制更具普遍的互操作性和隐私保护能力。
