Asynchronous Contact Tracing an ETSI SmartM2M/oneM2M standard

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has severely impacted the life of many people. Social distancing and vaccines are currently the main countermeasure in the attempt to limit the spread of the disease but lockdown clusters are creating severe damage to the economy and to the personal life of its citizens. The role of testing is crucial. However, testing must be associated with the identification of the candidates to be tested, considering also that global testing on this scale is impracticable, with present time constraints and the need for haste.

The role of telecommunications in this area has been exploited by various contact tracing

applications that are attempting to advise people about a potential risk of infection and signal the need for a test. It is essential to respect the personal privacy and respect enshrined EU regulations in order to increase acceptance by the public at large.
Standards for these personal applications for tracing people and their contacts are crucial in order to ensure future interop- erability among the different solutions developed during this initial period of crisis.

One response to the difficulties of establishing a method for Synchronous Contact Tracing (SCT), like e.g. Inria-Fraunhofer’s Robert, or the Apple-Google’s Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing, is to remove the time and space limitations and to trace surfaces that have been contaminated by the virus, rather than just recording the anonymous cryptokeys of persons involved in a contact. The underlying concept of SCT is based on the generic behaviour of getting a notification of a potential virus exposure in case of i) being close to an infected person at the same time and in the same space and ii) on the individual’s willingness and ability to declare his or her status as infected.

My objective is be able to monitor, detect, alert, forecast, in a nearly autonomic way, the presence of any natural and artificial pathogens, viruses and pollutants dangerous for living beings, present in things, air, and water and can thus overcome the risk of indecisions, delays or personal biased opinions which have been so disastrous in dealing with pandemics and environmentally hazardous major accidents using Internet of Things.

In solo, singular technologies have been studied for years. However, none were implemented in a coherent and coordinated and responsive way using the same format and protocols; the analogy with the pre-Internet era is apparent. One of the reasons is the lack of common standards for IoT globally adopted such as could derive as a by-product of an IoT communication standard.

My aim is to develop a breakthrough, by designing an IoT eHealth standard, and materialise it into an infrastructure and a uniform middleware based on the ETSI oneM2M standard, which can enable all detection and surveillance platforms to communicate and cooperate together. These challenges require the multidisciplinary and integrated intervention of public agencies and biotech companies specialised in all the scientific areas necessary to develop a radically new Pan-European surveillance system.

The ETSI standard Asynchronous Contact Tracing (ACT) that i recently introduced, traces an IoT connected object that may have been contaminated e.g. by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (or by any other future pandemic viruses or pollutions). The proposed standard platform clearly addresses generic needs and, on a long-term basis, may drastically and economically contribute to the development and the connection of a new real-time pathogen and pollution overlay alertness network. This shifts the paradigm, from searching for a person in the process of synchronously infecting another, to the tracing of objects which asynchronously can be a vehicle for potential contamination to humans.

ACT enables the people who have come into contact with a particular surface to be alerted to a potential contagion or pollution, and at the same time it can signal that at least one of the many persons who have been in contact with such solid or liquid objects is infected, applying de facto the well-known statistical studies of Group Testing and enabling a form of anonymous statistical screening of the population and applying to all the environments where people share the same physical space, such as a supermarket, schools, restaurants, hotels, gyms, offices, working plants, hospitals, hospices, etc. or applying to an object that is encountering people while it is in movement, such as a bus or a train, or potentially to any moving object. With ACT, the time and space synchronicity of two persons equipped with the same mobile application is not needed anymore, and, as such, more matches can be discovered between one person and its closeness to a precise location, where the presence of environmental anomalies or pathogens has been formally established by an IoT Detection Platform.

My aims are to develop a breakthrough global detection and inter-communication network focused on rapid response to bio-emergencies. This will radically change the current services already deployed by the National Public Health Institutes to monitor, alert, and advise political decision makers, public organizations, environmental Institutes and citizens by implementing new adaptable and modular automated diagnostic solutions for future pandemics and pollutions, combined with innovative technological solutions based on the concepts of inter-connected IoT. My tasks in this endeavour are to

• improve and generalise my already published overlay protocols, such as Arigatoni, or Avanced Semantic Discovery, or ACT to the IoT case, and apply it to an extended contact and forecast tracing case.

• software conceive, network interconnect, and envisage case studies, inside the oneM2M ETSI standard, of the ad hoc programmable real-time sensors monitoring of the spread of the infecting agent, as envisaged by research institutions and companies that have participated to the specification of the TS 103757.

• promote an ETSI Pan-European standard capable to a real-time forecasting of any kind of pathogens and pollutions to people in the EU space, in a anonymous, resilient, and secure way ; the standard should be sufficiently flexible and customisable nation-by-nation, according to their peculiar laws.

• I hope, with the already established ETSI partners and my Academic partners to safely and formally design and inter- connect the mentioned entities using a unique and standardised infrastructure. More precisely, we aims to design, improve, and develop an innovative and standardised oneM2M architecture able to:

• collect the information produced by the PCD and IVD based Detection Platform.

• correlate it to specific location and areas on the territory.

• elaborate and augment such information, including territory diffusion forecasts, by means of data fusion.

• share the elaborate information with the National Health System Services.

• empower on a more solid scientific understanding the political decision makers.

• share the elaborate information with the citizen via Web services.

• enable the citizen to discover their individual exposition to the pathogen in areas visited in the recent past, with a full respect of privacy (all the information remains on the user smartphone without any sharing with the rest of the system). PCD and IVD convey the information into common oneM2M actuators, that elaborate and push it in a IoT overlay network using heterogeneous underlay network technologies that usually walk on specific pathways with poor or no integration at all.