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Utah launched “Healthy Together” in April, a contact tracking application intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus by informing people if they have come into contact with someone who was later diagnosed with the virus.
Utah’s Healthy Together app does not use the Apple and Google Exposure Reporting API, instead opting for a less private GPS and Bluetooth-based solution that is currently available in a beta capacity. Healthy Together was created by social media startup Twenty, and it doesn’t take advantage of the anonymous, decentralized approach that Apple and Google are implementing, according to a report by CNBC.
The goal of the Healthy Together app is to help the 1,200 Utah Department of Health workers track contacts in person through phone calls. The Utah Department of Health has access to the name, phone number, and location data of people who test positive for COVID-19 and choose to share their data.
The app uses Bluetooth and GPS to determine when smartphone users contact each other, and if someone tests positive, they can share their location history and contact history in the past 14 days with a contact tracker. Twenty believes this can reduce the one-hour phone calls used for contact tracking to 16 minutes. From Twenty Chief Strategy Officer Jared Allgood
“Jeff and Sarah are two people in this example who do not know each other, but both have the application on their phones. Therefore, both phones emit Bluetooth and GPS signals. Through these data we can identify whether or not two people are spent some time together. “
“If Public Health is calling someone who has the app on their phone, and have been given permission to view this minimal set of data to make the contact tracking effort, now, instead of spending an hour, you know, interviewing Jeff and try to fill the gaps in your memory, together you can scroll through your location history list. “
The privacy-centric solution from Apple and Google does not allow personal information to be provided to public health departments, and does not involve location-based data collection, unlike Utah’s Healthy Together app. Twenty’s founders claim the Healthy Together app is enabled and users can choose to limit permissions like GPS or Bluetooth if they don’t want their location to be tracked, but it’s unclear how this affects the effectiveness of contact tracking design such as implemented in Utah.
According to the Utah state website, Utah opted for the Google and Apple solution because Bluetooth only “provides a less accurate image” than Bluetooth and GPS location data.
Healthy Together’s goal is to enable public health officials to understand how the disease spreads through the vector of people and places, and location and bluetooth data are needed to do so.
Bluetooth helps us understand person-to-person transmission, while GPS / location data helps us understand transmission zones – having these two important data points provides a more effective picture of how COVID-19 spreads. This data helps policy makers make the best possible decisions about how and where we begin to relax and modify constraints as our community and economy begin to revive.
One of the benefits of the Apple / Google API is Bluetooth tracking in the background that does not require an app to implement battery discharge functions or to be kept open by users for effective communication between smartphones. Utah will not have the benefit of the API by opting for an external solution, which could also affect the effectiveness of the application.
45,000 people have signed up for Utah’s contact tracking app, which is about two percent of the state’s population. Some estimates have indicated that contact tracking applications must be downloaded by 60 percent of the population to be effective.
Apple and Google have said they are aiming to launch the Exposure Notification API API in mid-May, so that we can see it as early as this week after the release of iOS 13.5. After the release of the update, the first applications that use the API can be launched.
