Visual Analytics Platform for Centralized COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and its dramatic worldwide impact has required global multidisciplinary actions to mitigate its effects. Mobile phone activity-based digital contact tracing (DCT) via Bluetooth low energy technology has been considered a powerful pandemic monitoring tool, yet it sparked a controversial debate about privacy risks for people. In order to explore the potential benefits of a DCT system in the context of occupational risk prevention, this article presents the potential of visual analytics methods to summarize and extract relevant information from complex DCT data collected during a long-term experiment at our research center. Visual tools were combined with quantitative metrics to provide insights into contact patterns among volunteers. Results showed that crucial actors, such as participants acting as bridges between groups could be easily identified ultimately allowing for making more informed management decisions aimed at containing the potential spread of a disease.