We present HABIT, a contact tracing system using a wearable hardware device designed specifically with the goals of public health officials in mind. Unlike current approaches, we use a dedicated hardware device instead of a phone app for proximity detection. Our use of a hardware device allows us to substantially improve the accuracy of proximity detection, achieve strong security and privacy guarantees that cannot be compromised by remote attackers, and have a more usable system, while only making our system minimally harder to deploy compared to a phone app in centralized organizations such as hospitals, universities, and companies.
The efficacy of our system is currently being evaluated in a pilot study at Yale University in collaboration with the Yale School of Public Health.
Category / Keywords: applications / contact tracing, COVID-19, privacy, hardware, accuracy Date: received 3 Aug 2020 Contact author: nmanohar at cs ucla edu, pmanohar@cs cmu edu, rajit manohar@yale edu Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20200804:070500 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2020/949