Bluetooth & Beyond for Exposure Notification Technology
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 6 PM CET
Overview
Contact tracing works by identifying people who were recently exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Bluetooth signals can be used to detect when two devices, e.g. two smartphones, were close to each other.
- Amanda Wilson will briefly summarize current knowledge about how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted, i.e. ballistic droplets vs. short-range aerosol vs. long-range aerosol vs. fomites. She will then present an approach inspired by quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) to estimate how great a risk of infection from short-range aerosol transmission is predicted by contact at a given timing relative to symptom onset (given variable infectiousness), duration (given that dose increases with the length of exposure), and distance (as best as can be captured by Bluetooth).
- Curran Schiefelbein will present more elaborate experiments on Bluetooth performance, using robots to simulate a range of scenarios.
- Ramsey Faragher will discuss the potential for Bluetooth and other technologies such as ultra-wideband (UWB) and ultrasound to provide more and more reliable information, both about proximity and about indoor vs. outdoor status. These currently involve working outside the limitations of the current Google Apple Exposure Notification protocol, but can still be done in a decentralized, privacy-preserving manner.
Co-hosted with The Big Data Institute at
The University of Oxford
Meet the Speakers

Dr. Amanda Wilson
Dr. Amanda M. Wilson studies microbial exposure and risk assessment, human behavior, and exposure modeling. Recently, she has collaborated... internationally to develop COVID-19 risk assessment models and was a part of the team that developed a risk scoring algorithm for a COVID-19 contact tracing app, Covid Watch. She was recently awarded a University of Arizona Health Sciences Career Development Award to expand her research training to address public health risk trade-offs. She received her postdoctoral training at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah, and received her PhD in environmental health sciences at the University of Arizona. Dr. Wilson was featured inHispanic Engineer & Information Technologymagazine in 2018 and has been interviewed byDiscover Magazine,New York Magazine, and The Washington Post on her COVID-19 and fomite-mediated exposure research. Read more

Dr. Ramsey Faragher
Dr. Ramsey Faragher is an expert in GPS and other location technologies and is the inventor of the Supercorrelation signal processing technique for GPS... receivers. He is the Founder and CEO of Focal Point Positioning and a Fellow of Queens' College, University of Cambridge. During his time in the Defence sector he developed multi-sensor positioning systems for airborne, ground, and submarine vehicles, many building upon his award-winning work on the NAVSOP opportunistic radio positioning system. He was also part of the original design team for the ExoMars martian rover's "Seeker" visual navigation system. Ramsey holds more than 20 granted patents and has been the recipient of numerous awards from IEEE, ION, and RIN. Read more

Curran Schiefelbein
Curran Schiefelbein is a Technical Staff member of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center now in its... 70th year of meeting critical national security needs. Since joining the Lab in 2002, she has enjoyed prototyping and testing distributed sensor networks for varied challenges, including human, biological, and chemical threats. In 2020, she joined the Lab’s efforts to help the CDC assess and support PACT/AEN deployments in the US. She has worked closely with public health teams, university faculty, and engineers at Apple and Google, to help people assess their exposure and respond appropriately. Curran holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in computer science from Brown University. Outside of work, she co-parents four lively children, volunteers with the Scouts, and has consulted for the Melanoma Research Alliance. Read more
Coordinating Committee Co-Chairs
Joanna Masel, PhD
Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at The University of Arizona
Luca Ferretti, PhD
Senior Researcher in Statistical Genetics and Pathogen DynamicsBig Data Institute, The University of Oxford
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