COVID-19 Contact-tracing Apps: a Survey on the Global Deployment and Challenges
This addresses the problem of understanding and improving contact-tracing technologies for public health officials and researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
The paper conducted a pioneering review of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps, mapping their global deployment and identifying vulnerabilities, with a focus on Bluetooth-based decentralized approaches.
To address the massive spike in uncertainties triggered by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there is an ever-increasing number of national governments that are rolling out contact-tracing Apps to aid the containment of the virus. The first hugely contentious issue facing the Apps is the deployment framework, i.e. centralized or decentralized. Based on this, the debate branches out to the corresponding technologies that underpin these architectures, i.e. GPS, QR codes, and Bluetooth. This work conducts a pioneering review of the above scenarios and contributes a geolocation mapping of the current deployment. The Apps vulnerabilities and the directions of research are identified, with a special focus on the Bluetooth-inspired decentralized paradigm.