Update at 11:20 pm on April 16, 2020
The government has chosen the application proposed by Bending Spoons and created in collaboration with the Santagostino Medical Center. The following is the original article published in the early afternoon today, anticipating the likely decision on the contact tracing app.
The group of experts appointed by the Minister of Innovation, Paola Pisano, is finishing its work to indicate the application that can be used for contact tracing (“contact tracing”), in an attempt to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in Italy . The selection work involved 74 experts in different disciplines, who examined the proposals submitted by companies and research centers in response to the rapid tender launched by Pisano at the end of March. The initiative is followed with great interest because it could offer new tools to contain the infections, but the information available is still limited and partial.
As has been reported by various sources in recent days, it seems that experts have identified as the best candidate an application created by Bending Spoons, a company based in Milan and with a strong presence in the app market, in collaboration with the Santagostino Medical Center. (CMS), which in recent years has opened numerous clinics in Lombardy and Bologna, offering healthcare services at rather affordable prices and with a digital-oriented approach to patient management (reservations, payments, online assistance and medical records).
The app is awaiting an evaluation by the Prime Minister, who has another application called CovidApp as a second choice and has been developed through a collaboration of researchers and IT experts. The first option seems to have convinced more because it can count on a company like Bending Spoons that already has a strong presence in the application market, with some successful cases such as Live Quiz. The company also produces and manages numerous apps for the international market, especially for iPhones, and which often reach the top places in the rankings of the most popular applications.
Contact tracing
Contact tracing is useful during an outbreak to identify people who may have been infected with a contagion. It is mostly carried out by interviewing people who tested positive for the coronavirus, with the aim of reconstructing which individuals they came into contact with and were therefore exposed to the risk of contagion. It's time-consuming work and properly trained staff, two resources that are in short supply during a pandemic. at 18:00. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter Technology could help solve the problem, with solutions to make contact tracing more widespread and shared. Experiences in this sense have already been conducted in some Asian countries, such as South Korea, with applications that track people's geographical location and warn them in the event that they have passed in the vicinity of someone who then tested positive for coronavirus.
Last week, Apple and Google announced that they were working to put some sort of standard in the iOS and Android operating systems to make it easier to build contact tracing apps. Healthcare institutions could therefore create solutions based on a single and shared system, simplifying data management and offering some more guarantees for privacy.
The application given as a favorite
So far not much information has been released about the app created by Bending Spoons with the CMS, but it should work similar to the one they are working on Apple and Google, therefore based on Bluetooth technology (BLE). Simplifying a lot, through the app, each smartphone periodically emits a unique and anonymous identification code (ID) that can be picked up by other smartphones using the same app nearby, within a few meters. If one of the owners of the app reports that they have tested positive for coronavirus, the system allows you to notify people with whom they had been in proximity in the previous days.
Bending Spoons is part of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) initiative, a collaboration launched at European level to establish common solutions for contact tracing, which are both useful and able to protect privacy. of users. In the presentation document, PEPP-PT explains that he has thought of systems such as Bluetooth to detect any contacts at risk for contagion, so that the data are managed anonymously and remain mostly on the smartphones of individual users. The basic idea is the same as Apple and Google, but it is not yet clear how they will be able to change the apps when the tracking is made possible directly thanks to their operating systems.
According to the Post, Bending Spoons and CMS have created a prototype of the application, with a rather flexible approach. The basic idea is that others can be added to the basic functions, in a modular way, in order to quickly offer new versions of the app that meet other needs. The system could be used, for example, to add a section in which to fill in the self-declaration form necessary for travel, simplifying both the compilation and verification work by the police.
Privacy
Using Bluetooth, data on contacts at risk are obtained, while information on users' movements or geographical coordinates are not saved or shared. This setting seems to be a good compromise to protect on the one hand the privacy of users and on the other hand to guarantee the functioning of the system. In South Korea, where geographical information via GPS was also used, information was disseminated which – albeit anonymous – made it possible to trace the identities of the people involved with some ease.
CovidApp
The reserve option indicated by the experts consulted by the Minister of Innovation is according to newspapers and other CovidApp sources, the result of a project shared between different IT professionals, with an approach more open (the code is available in an online library). The information on the operating principle is also in this case a bit vague, and it is difficult to verify the statements in the documentation about the possibility of having more accurate results thanks to the exploitation of other solutions besides Bluetooth.
However, the basic idea is not very different from that of the other application, even if in this case there are two distinct apps: CovidApp for users and CovidDoc for healthcare personnel, who are responsible for confirming the reports of those who are declares positive for coronavirus. The system also gives the possibility of providing geographic information via GPS, but with an option to be activated voluntarily and aware of the greater risks for privacy (the system is however designed to keep the identity of those who participate anonymous).
A plan is needed
In recent days it seems that the government's evaluation of contact tracing solutions has slowed down considerably, perhaps due to the recent appointment of Vittorio Colao is responsible for preparing the projects for the so-called “phase 2” of the ongoing health emergency, namely the one in which some restrictions will be relaxed as long as we manage to keep the spread of the coronavirus under control. Contact tracing will be one of the strategies to be followed, and therefore it is likely that there must be a discussion on the work done so far and the plans that Colao's team has in mind. And this is the real underlying theme.
Regardless of which technology solution is chosen, contact tracing will only work if the government develops a coherent and effective plan to manage the data collected through the application. It will be necessary to decide whether to collect the information in a centralized online register or whether to keep most of the data only on individual smartphones, it will be necessary to determine how to report users with a positive result for coronavirus tests, and it will be necessary to decide whether to entrust the management of the reports to health institutions (general practitioners, hospital staff) or to administrative ones (mayors, regions). In short, a mechanism will be needed to extract as much information as possible from the available data.
As South Korea's experience has shown, contact tracing can only work if it is integrated into a broader contagion detection strategy. According to various experts, it will therefore be necessary to carry out hundreds of thousands of serological tests, which look for antibodies to the coronavirus in the blood, in the most exposed sections of the population such as: health personnel, workers in essential sectors and with constant contact with the public (as they started to do in no particular order and without coordinating some Regions). For the positives it will then be necessary to carry out diagnostic investigations to detect if they have an infection in progress, and at that point to trace all the contacts they had in the previous two weeks to identify any exposed.
