Your phone could soon warn you if you’ve come close to someone with COVID-19

A new system that uses your smartphone’s Bluetooth may soon be able to tell you how long you were next to someone infected with the new coronavirus, and how far away you were from them, researchers say.

The technology pushes your phone to release signals that look like lines of random letters to nearby phones in an effort to quickly track and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 — the virus driving the coronavirus pandemic, according to a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published last week.

There are more than 2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus globally, along with at least 133,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. In the United States, more than 619,000 people have been diagnosed with the disease and at least 27,000 have died.

The research team included experts from MIT and other institutions such as Harvard University, Boston University and the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health, the release said.

In a Morse code-like fashion, the released signals are private and constantly changing, protecting the identity of both the healthy and the sick, researchers said.

“In order for the U.S. to really contain this epidemic, we need to have a much more proactive approach that allows us to trace more widely contacts for confirmed cases,” Louise Ivers, an infectious disease expert and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said in the release. “This automated and privacy-protecting approach could really transform our ability to get the epidemic under control here.”

How does Bluetooth tracking work?

Under this system, doctors would give any patient who tested positive for the new coronavirus a QR code that the patient would then have to scan into an app, the release said. Doing so logs their information into a wireless database.

Others who have downloaded the app can then scan the database to see if their phone picked up any signals, which researchers have coined “chirps,” from devices that belong to infected individuals, the release said. It’s similar to Apple’s “Find My” feature.

Only chirps deemed “medically significant” will be saved, researchers said. A chirp will be considered significant if it was detected about six feet away and remained there for at least 10 minutes.

“It’s like being in the middle of the ocean and waving a light,” Marc Zissman, co-principal investigator of the project and the associate head of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Cyber Security and Information Science Division, said in the release.

Researchers said the system can also send notifications to your phone, alerting you when you’ve been exposed to Covid-19 — the disease the virus causes. Those notifications would include advice on what steps to take next such as self-isolation and communication with health experts through the app to discuss health status, the release said.

Worst case scenario, public health officials might ask you to get tested if they noticed a cluster of cases coming from the same source.

Last week, Google and Apple announced they are developing a similar system using Bluetooth, the Verge reported.

Other countries have other systems in place to help slow the growing number of Covid-19 cases. South Korea developed a plan using medical records, cell phone GPS records, credit card transactions and closed-circuit television to track contacts,as previously reported by McClatchy News.

But using such tracking methods often raises questions about individual privacy concerns, MIT researchers said in the release.

The researchers are working to collaborate with smartphone manufacturers such as Apple, Microsoft and Google, the release said.

“It’s not a contest; it’s a collective effort on the part of many, many people to get a system working,” Ron Rivest, principal investigator of the project and MIT Institute Professor, said in the release.

The team is also demonstrating the system to state and federal government agencies, according to the release.

This story was originally published April 15, 2020 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Your phone could soon warn you if you’ve come close to someone with COVID-19."