A contact tracking app that was downloaded by a fifth of Ireland in 36 hours could undergo a pilot project in Pennsylvania that could be launched in the coming weeks as part of an effort to more quickly contain the coronavirus outbreaks by notifying people who may have been exposed, an official with the state Department of Health said Wednesday.
Otherwise, the state Department of Health has said little about its plans for the app, other than that it is trying to introduce a mobile app and a $ 1.9 million contract with software developer NearForm Ltd of Ireland to implement it and keep it.
At a hearing hosted by Democrats in the state House of Representatives, Lindsey Mauldin, special assistant to the state secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, said department staff is working with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to discover how to use The App in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is also working with Delaware, and neighboring states could join, Mauldin told lawmakers.
“We are working on a pilot now and working on testing the application. We hope to have it live, I think, by the end of August, ”said Mauldin.
The application is based on the smartphone technology developed by Apple and Google. Several states are interested in using Apple-Google technology for an application, but none have yet introduced one.
It is designed to automatically notify people if they may have been exposed to the coronavirus. It relies on Bluetooth wireless technology to detect when someone who downloaded the app has spent time around another user of the app who then tests positive for the virus.
The identity of the app’s users will be protected by encryption and anonymous identification beacons that change frequently, the companies said.
Several states have implemented applications that use other approaches, such as satellite-based GPS location tracking, but there is little evidence that they have been successful. One of the first to launch, in Utah, since then has disabled the track and trace features.
In Pennsylvania, running an app is paramount before schools reopen for the fall semester, the Health Department said in its contract proposal.
Your application selection process includes a requirement that the developer should have already been thoroughly tested in other states or jurisdictions.
A contract with NearForm was not signed, the department said.
But the NearForm app is already operational in Ireland, where its COVID Tracker app had over 1 million downloads, about 20% of Ireland’s population, and over a quarter of smartphone users, within 36 hours. post-launch on July 7, according to NearForm.
The app has earned some praise in Europe. British newspaper The Guardian described the Irish app as “a brilliant success”, in contrast to unstable efforts to launch an app in Britain. The newspaper said the Irish app was the fastest download per capita in Europe and had begun to detect cases of infection.
The NearForm app also meets the criteria for functionality and privacy that Apple, Google and the agencies consider necessary in the administration of Governor Tom Wolf, the Department of Health wrote in the proposed contract.
Applications from other developers collected location data, geotagged individual phones or requested microphone access to determine and validate proximity between phones, the department said.
