Automated Contact Tracing for Large Business Using Indoor Location Technology

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Abstract Large businesses need an efficient, accurate and scalable method to perform contact tracing of staff and visitors that occur within their building during an epidemic. The manpower needed to conduct traditional contact tracing may make it unaffordable for a building with a large number of people. This project will develop an automated system to generate contact tracing reports. Wireless indoor location technology based on Ultra-Wideband (UWB) wearable tags (e.g. badges) will be used. Within the building all staff and visitors will be issued the UWB transmitting tags to identify them and allow tracking of their movements within the building. The business will need to inform the staff and visitors about the contact tracing and obtain their consent for them to have access to the building. A time history of everyone's position in the building will be maintained by the business. This data will not be accessible from outside the business building and will be strictly access controlled inside the building. Contact trace reports will be computed using this data if an individual is identified as having a contagious disease such as COVID-19. An authorized business official will be able to search the time history data over a specified time for close contacts the infected person had with others inside the building. The search will allow specifying for contact time, contact distance and the time period. The output will be a list of individuals who had contact with the infected person based on the search criteria. By knowing the names of the persons that had close contact with an infected person, the business can follow the established protocol they have chosen for contact tracing. This phase I SBIR project will conduct feasibility testing of this system. Prototype wearable UWB tags will be developed. Prototype software will be developed to collect, compute and search the position time history of an individual. Performance evaluation of the system will be conducted in a simulated environment to test feasibility and measure success.