BLE-based sensors for privacy-enabled contagious disease monitoring with zero trust architecture

Abstract

Digital contact tracing is an important technique to stop the spread of infectious diseases. Due to data integrity, and privacy problems, smartphone apps suffer from low adoption rates. Also, these apps excessively drain batteries and sometimes give false alarms. They are also not able to detect fomite-based contacts or indirect contacts. BEacon-based Contact Tracing or BECT is a contact tracing framework that uses Bluetooth beacon sensors that periodically broadcast “tokens” to close users. Users who are positively diagnosed voluntarily provide their tokens to the health authority-maintained server for tracing contacts. We target environments like campuses like companies, colleges, and prisons, where use can be mandated thus mitigating low adoption rate issues. This approach detects indirect contacts and preserves the device’s battery. We create a simulation to examine the proposed framework’s performance in detecting indirect contacts and compare it with the existing apps’ framework. We also analyze the cost and power consumption for our technique and assess the placement strategies for beacons. Incorporating Zero Trust Architecture enhances the framework’s security and privacy.