Today, the COVID-19 Pathfinder project funded by Fondation Botnar came to an and after a successful final review meeting. Over the course of the last 4 years, the project, led by EPFL, supported the development of Digital Contact Tracing technologies, in particular the Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) protocol that was the base for Apple and Google’s Exposure Notifiation technology adopted by several COVID-19 national apps worldwide.
The project also supported the development of wearable proximity sensors based on Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology, that affords more accurate distance measurements than attenuation-based systems. The sensor hardware was developed by 3db Access and the sensor firmware was developed at ISI Foundation based on the SocioPatterns firmware components.
The new generation of UWB-based sensors were deployed and validated in a hospital technical pilot in Switzerland. After that, we deployed the well-tested SocioPatterns attenuation-based sensors alongiside the new UWB-based sensors in 4 1-day studies: households in Kenya (about 100 participants), households in Côte d’Ivoire (65 participants), a hospital in Kenya (100 participants) and a hospital in Côte d’Ivoire (100 participants). These data collection will allow us to carry out extensive comparison of the performance of attenuation-based vs UWB-based proximity sensors in real-world environments of interest for digital contact tracing applications and for trasnmission studies of infectious diseases.
The deployments in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire were used as a technology probes to investigate user-oriented and social aspects of digital contact tracing, identifying barriers to adoption and emphasizing the need for culturally sensitive wearable devices. The results of this study were published at the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.