BluBLE, space-time social distancing to monitor the spread of COVID-19: Poster abstract

Abstract

Social distancing has been the key factor which has helped control the COVID-19 pandemic spread. We present BluBLE, which utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based mobile sensing to help monitor these social distancing protocols. Specifically, we formulate the problem in two parts - spatial and temporal social distancing. The spatial distancing formulation aims to enforce the 6 feet distance recommended by various public health organization around the world. The temporal distancing formulation aims to inform and prevent users from entering high-occupancy regions (hotspots) in buildings. BluBLE achieved more than 80 % classification accuracy in both the tasks, that is, predicting if a user is within '6' feet of another user as well as characterizing the user's location within a particular hotspot.