The government of Qatar’s mandatory COVID-19-tracing app has come into question after an Amnesty International investigation exposed a weakness in its configuration that could have left it open for cyberattacks.
Once the vulnerability was flagged, authorities in Qatar updated and fixed the issue within a day, according to Amnesty International. However, if there had been an attack, it was...
Roughly a month after first announcing their unprecedented collaboration, Apple and Google have updated their devices' operating systems today with the first component of their contact tracing API.
Referred to by the companies as "Exposure Notifications," the technology aims to help public health agencies deploy apps that tell individuals when they may have been exposed to another person with...
(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Under resourced countries may be getting a coronavirus app thanks to new efforts from the World Health Organization, Reuters reports.
The organization plans to roll out a new app that will help people figure out if they are symptomatic of the coronavirus. According to the Reuter’s report, down the pipeline WHO may be rolling out a Bluetooth-based coronavirus tracing app for middle- and low-...
SWISS ARMY TESTS TRACING APP
A COVID-19 contact tracing app is being trialed by 100 soldiers at the Chamblon army base near Lausanne, Switzerland. The Bluetooth-enabled app logs if users have spent more than 15 minutes within two metres of another user. Then, when one uploads a positive test result for COVID-19, the system and alerts users to the contact. In order to test its efficacy, the...
This month has kicked off with a slew of announcements about tracing efforts. From India’s new policy requiring all workers to download its government app to China’s new fever-senseing glasses, governments are looking for ways to keep tabs on the virus.
As of today, all Indian employers are responsible for making sure their domestic employees – in both the public and private sector, download a...
According to a recent statement by Australia’s Health Minister Greg Hunt, the newly launched COVIDSafe contact tracing app in the country has seen more than 2 million downloads, just over 24 hours since the app was available for registration on 26 April.
The COVIDSafe resource website explains that the smartphone-based app helps state and territory health officials to quickly contact people who...
While governments and tech titans are rushing to create contact-tracing apps to curb the spread of COVID-19, a new review published by the Ada Lovelace Institute in the United Kingdom says not so fast.
“Based on the current evidence in this review, the significant technical limitations, and deep social risks, of digital contact tracing outweigh the value offered to the crisis response,” authors...
Deploying contact tracing earlier in the UK would have saved lives, an epidemiologist working with the government on the forthcoming NHS tracing app has told the BBC.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show on 26 April, Professor Christophe Fraser from the Oxford Big Data Institute said he thought lives would have been saved if a contact tracing policy had been pursued earlier in the outbreak.
“I worked...
Senior-focused digital health company CarePredict rolled out a new set of contact-tracing tools designed for senior living facilities at the end of March.
Named PinPoint, the new set of tools is broken up into four types of tracing: contact tracing, location tracing, path tracing and room traffic. The company said it used indoor location tech to identify where a staff member or patient was in...
The Danish Government has collaborated with IT service provider Netcompany to create digital solutions to ease the national lockdown restrictions. The Danish tech company and the National Board of Digitisation have developed ‘COVIDmeter’, which allows users to input and monitor coronavirus symptoms, and the ‘Mobile Proximity App’, which tracks the spread of the virus.
WHY IT MATTERS
COVIDmeter (...
