One of the first calls issued by the Minister for Technological Innovation and Digitization, Paola Pisano, expires tomorrow, with the aim of finding applications and other solutions that can reduce the spread of the coronavirus epidemic in Italy. The call – which, given the emergency, has a duration of just three days – was launched as part of “Innova per l'Italia”, a broader initiative dedicated to universities, research centers, companies and research institutions for : “To provide a contribution in the field of devices for the prevention, diagnostics and monitoring for the containment and contrast of the spread of the coronavirus”. The idea is to quickly activate monitoring services for patients and infections, but technological obstacles are not lacking, as well as concerns about the protection of personal data.
The first call (“fast call”) concerns two distinct areas, albeit with different points of contact: apps that help improve home care for people with COVID-19 for whom hospitalization is not necessary, and applications for the “active” control of the risk of contagion, the so-called “contact tracing”.
Telemedicine
There have been applications on the market for some time that allow you to keep track of your health conditions, but they are rarely integrated with other systems, for example to allow your doctor to check the data remotely and intervene in case you find any anomaly. The call therefore asks manufacturers and designers to propose their apps on the subject, with particular attention to COVID-19 (the “fast call” also speaks of other chronic diseases, whose remote control could make life easier for patients).
The notice mentions “apps, websites and chatbots” that allow you to self-assess your symptoms and track their progress over time. Solutions of this type could help alleviate the workload, at least in the initial stages, of national and regional emergency and health advice numbers, which receive a large number of calls in recent weeks.
Through a system of questions and answers, the app could help you better limit your symptoms and understand whether or not it is COVID-19. The application would of course not replace a doctor's opinion, but it could offer a first resource to help you get an idea of the situation.
Things to know about the coronavirus The Coronavirus Post newsletter updates you on the latest news : it's free and arrives every Thursday at 6pm. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter Again with question and answer systems via a chatbot, the application could be used to track the trend of symptoms and their evolution, remembering for example to detect the temperature, and to enter the data so as to be visible from a distance to the healthcare personnel. However, the development of a system of this type would take time and the obstacles in technical terms and in terms of privacy protection are not lacking. Health data are among the most important in terms of protection of personal data, and any system of this type should offer great guarantees on the security of the information collected.
Contact tracing
In recent months, applications for the so-called “contact tracing” have been tested in some Asian countries, tracing the movements and contacts of people, in in order to rebuild the chains of contagion faster and try to stop them by reducing the spread of the epidemic. The experience of South Korea is probably the most relevant in this sense, because it has led in a few weeks to the development and use of solutions for tracking movements.
For weeks, the South Korean government has been using data collected from cellular networks, GPS systems, credit card transactions and video surveillance cameras to track the movements of the population. The information collected is then shown anonymously on a dedicated website, and, if necessary, sent via SMS to anyone who might have crossed paths with an infected person, in order to warn them and invite them to perform a test to check for coronavirus infection. .
Although anonymous, the data provided by the government are quite detailed, to the point of making it possible to identify the places where an acquaintance or family member has moved. Initially, the information was provided by the government in a database that was not easy to consult, which offered some more guarantees for privacy. In recent weeks, individual computer scientists and application companies have drawn on government data, crossing them with each other to offer maps and other detailed services on the geographic location of the infected. The application keeps track of your position and if it emerges that you have been in the vicinity of an infected person, it sends a notification to its owner.
South Korea went from having several hundred new cases daily to a few dozen in a few weeks, but it is still unclear whether contact tracing applications played a major role. Above all, the country has conducted a massive campaign to test as many people as possible under all circumstances, carrying out nearly 360,000 tests. This solution has made it possible – and is allowing – to identify new cases early, keep them better under control and above all isolate them from their acquaintances, so that the contagion does not continue.
As an analysis published on the Wired website has extensively told, in recent days in Italy contact tracing applications inspired by experiences in Asian countries have circulated, albeit with more limited functionality.
STOPCovid19 is one of the apps that has received the most attention. It is produced by the Italian company Webtek and says it can offer a system to track the chains of infections, in order to prevent potentially infected people from coming into contact with others.
Once the user's consent has been obtained, STOPCovid19 records its geographical position via GPS and then periodically sends the information to a centralized register associated with its mobile number. In the event that a user is found to be infected, health authorities may consult the registry to look for people who have come into contact with the person with coronavirus. The CEO of Webtek, Emanuele Piasini, explained to Wired that each user will always have the possibility to delete their data, as required by the European regulation on the protection of personal data (GDPR).
Like other applications, STOPCovid19 has the defect of being useful only when it is used by many people: in the absence of massive participation, the collection of data would be incomplete and would not allow easy tracking of other exposed people. It is not yet clear how the system could be shared with the authorities, and within what legal terms.
Other applications are based on the use of multiple receivers usually present on smartphones, such as those for cellular signal, WiFi or exchanging data via Bluetooth and NFC (Near Field Communication, the system used for example to pay via a contactless POS) . Some of these solutions require that the data always remain on the smartphones of individual users, without sharing them on other servers, in order to better protect their privacy. However, there are doubts about the effectiveness of these systems and, as for STOPCovid19, the problem of the number of users remains: if it remained low, it would not offer relevant data to trace the chains of contagion.
Privacy
In recent days, various experts for the protection of personal data have raised doubts and concerns about contact tracing initiatives, recalling that choices made during an emergency and responding to a need in the short term could have long-term consequences. Tracking the movements of citizens in a systematic way implies a level of control that does not yet exist in our country and in most Western democracies, and would therefore require some additional evaluation in the relationship between costs and benefits.
Last week, the announcement by the Lombardy Region on the control of telephone data to measure the movements of the population and their compliance with the restrictions imposed by the government had led to many perplexities. To these were added those on the advancement of technologies in facial recognition, through mass video surveillance, which now also allows the identification of individuals wearing a mask, with further repercussions for privacy especially in countries with undemocratic regimes.
Minister Pisano however assured that any decision on the ban and the solutions to be used will be assessed by the Authority for the protection of personal data. In recent days, however, the guarantor Antonello Soro had not ruled out the possibility of using control systems against the epidemic. For serious health reasons, the GDPR provides for some exceptions, but these must be carefully assessed as clarified by the European Data Protection Committee.
Next steps
Interested parties will have until 1pm on Thursday 26 March to present their proposals to the Minister for Innovation. Applications will then be evaluated by a working group which includes officials from the Ministry of Health, the Higher Institute of Health, the World Health Organization and members of an interdisciplinary scientific committee. The timing of the project is not yet clear, but the progress of the proposals will be one of the criteria included in the evaluation, to do it as quickly as possible.
