Paper 2020/1479

Automatic Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing of Novel Coronavirus Infection by Cloud-Enabled WBAN using Blockchain

Anupam Pattanayak, Subhasish Dhal, and Sourav Kanti Addya

Abstract

Governments and policy makers are finding it difficult to curb the enormous spread of pandemic Covid-19 till the vaccine is invented and becomes available for use. When a person is detected to be infected with Novel coronavirus, the task of identifying the persons who have come across the victim in past fortnight is a challenging task. Identifying these contact persons manually is a hilarious task and often yields incomplete data. Some governments have used digital technology for contact tracing but it is prone to compromise privacy of citizens. In this paper, we propose to use blockchain for recording every transaction in a secure manner that involves communications between users who are equipped with cloud-enabled body area networks. Whenever an user is tested coronavirus positive, the health officials and concerned administration immediately finds only those blockchain transaction records corresponding to the infected persons to identify the contact tracings in the past fortnight. Further, if a contact person is suffering from high temparature that is also detected automatically by the proposed system. This proposed system will help authoroties immensely to quickly quarantine the contacts of Covid-19 cases and curb the spread of coronavirus beyond a limit while maintaining the privacy of users.