Ramesh Raskar: Hello everyone.
This is Ramesh Raskar from MIT Media Lab, and today we're talking about contact tracing
for public health, as well as for reopening businesses with Safe Paths.
It's a solution that came out of MIT, it's open source and already available in many
ways.
Contact tracing is about using smartphone technology to compute proximity between individuals.
Second, is to notify if you're cross spot and provide some location and context.
Third, is to create dashboards and coordination tools for public health, as well as businesses.
Safe Paths is creating this two-sided solutions.
On one side, there's a Safe Path's app that can be used by individuals or employees for
exposure notification and access to information.
Very soon, it will have other abilities for personalized guidance and symptom tracking,
quarantine verification, and so on.
Ramesh Raskar: Then on the right, we have the coordination
tool for public health and businesses, a safe places dashboard that can speed up the tracing
conversations and aggregate data.
Very soon, it'll be able to predict hotspots and coordinate at home publishing, which could
be students or employees with integrated dashboards.
In terms of proximity technologies, we want to support as many technologies as possible.
GPS, Bluetooth, including the Google and Apple exposure notification APIs and others.
Now this would have been easy as a software project, but the key here is how do we achieve
all of this with two [inaudible 00:01:48] constraints, which is all of this has to be
privacy preserving and it should be interoperable.
That's where Safe Paths really focuses on, privacy-preserving and interoperable.
Ramesh Raskar: A Safe Path has three pillars.
In technology, we have the flagship app and the which is the dashboard, but we also have
one of the largest GitHubs for contact tracing, open source code with MIT license, you can
do anything you want with it.
They're releasing alogarithms and SDKs and APIs, and they're creating interoperable standards
in the think tank, reporting of privacy and ethics guidelines because we have privacy
experts, ethics experts, legal epidemiologists and so on.
We often convene the stakeholders and also do landscape analysis of all the solutions
that are out there.
For implementation, we have fantastic partners who engages public health, all corporations
and also Pro-Act training and monitoring material.
Ramesh Raskar: I'm very delighted to have a Safe Paths Alliance
made up of MIT faculty.
A lot of our work is shaped by conversation with WHO and CDC, and HHS and the Mayo Clinic
and so on.
Also we have a very strong nonprofit partner Path-Chek that works with us.
Many teams all over the world have joined forces with us for Bluetooth solution, for
identity, for ledgers, for serologic tests and so on.
It's wonderful to see all this collaboration coming together.
In that sense, we are not a vendor and we are an open source effort to support all these
entities.
So our goal is not to compete, but to help everybody else.
So in that sense, Safe Paths is building technology that enables individuals and businesses in
many areas.
Whether you are a school or insurance player or a government or public health and so on.
Ramesh Raskar: So for workers, how do you get sick leave
approvals in a privacy preserving way?
For schools, how can you manage entrances to attend classes, but also monitor COVID
plus students who may be staying in dorms and so on.
So we have a range of solutions that are being developed that are privacy-preserving.
Here's an example of a flow of an individual so the exposure notification is an important
but only a small piece of the puzzle, because your [inaudible 00:04:13] contact tracing,
ability to triage, figuring out whether this person is telehealth intervention or not.
If they're tested positive or negative, should they still self quarantine?
If they finish their quarantine, how do they get back in the society and how do we close
the loop in public health so they can monitor and have a bird's eye view in what's going
on.
Ramesh Raskar: For businesses also the experience for the
employees could be very different, which is how do you check symptoms at the entrances?
How do you partner with temperature monitoring companies?
How do you interface with serologic test companies?
How do you stagger scheduling for conferences and events, and so on?
Many of these pieces cannot be built by Safe Paths.
So what we have, we have been getting a lot of inbound interest from solution providers
as well as solution seekers.
So if you're a solution provider or a seeker, please send a one page summary.
Every Tuesday a fantastic team looks at it and starts interfacing with others.
So let's spend a couple of minus on the fantastic Google and Apple exposure notification proximity
API, that allows an infected person to upload the keys that they have transmitted or the
Bluetooth channel to a server and a healthy person can download those keys every day to
see if they may have been exposed to an infected person.
Ramesh Raskar: There's a fantastic Bluetooth API, and we're
building many solutions on top of this.
So the good thing about Bluetooth is that it's one of the best proximity indicators.
Nevertheless, it has a lot of challenges, because we need significant adoption for it
to be effective.
It may not solve the problems when the infections spread from surfaces, so-called fomites and
inclusivity could be a challenge if not everybody in the country or the city or the business
has a smartphone.
GPS on the other hand has own benefits and challenges.
It's available in majority of phones.
Effectiveness scales linearly with adoption, but also it has challenges.
Its accuracy is not as good and so on.
The encryption on GPS is more challenging than Bluetooth.
Nevertheless if you adjust Bluetooth for... if you do not provide location context for
contact tracing, unfortunately it'll create a lot of false positives.
Ramesh Raskar: And without the lack of context, the user
may have a low trust in the system.
So for example, if they got an alert when they're going to a grocery store, a coffee
shop, and a social event and they don't know at which place the infected person was, then
they might get an alert "You're exposed."
But at grocery store, they may be wearing a mask and not shaking hands and maintaining
social distance.
So an exposure alert from an encounter in a grocery store is meaningless.
So this lack of agency could create a lot of confusion and so on.
So we believe that a contact tracing solution should have a very strong element of location
and context.
If you want to create hotspots, spread analysis and quality notification, you still need the
location context.
So we're working closely with conversations with Apple and Google of course these protocols
are not going to change overnight.
Ramesh Raskar: But at MIT we're publishing series of papers
on how these protocols could change in the future, so that they also provide a location
context.
So in this case, we'll continue to use the Apple and Google protocols to roll out the
first solutions, but over time we will try to include blurred and encrypted GPS has a
plate payload on Bluetooth.
So please stay tuned and definitely read our papers.
Now if you're a business or a government and deciding which digital solutions to use for
contact tracing and reopening businesses, we have published as you can see on the bottom
right, a landscape analysis of various COVID-19 solutions.
Also we have another paper called Apps Gone Rogue, where apps could have unintended consequences.
We're seeing all over the world an early adoption has ended to all kinds of problems and had
to go back to the drawing board.
Ramesh Raskar: So we think that these few factors, these
eight factors that are very critical to choose.
There should be privacy first for healthy individuals, no data should be captured that's
centralized.
It should be open sourced to avoid a lock with a vendor.
It should be interoperable.
So even if population travels from one state to another or one country to another, it still
works, supports multiple languages.
A comprehensive contract tracing solution should also support non-smartphone users so
that we have some inclusiveness.
It should involve solutions for public health in terms of dashboards and being able to coordinate.
Of course, it should be modular and not displace the health IT solution you may already have.
Ramesh Raskar: So Safe Paths has resources to assign advisors.
So if you need, even if you're going to pick your own solution, if you need an advisor
to informally help you making decisions, Safe Paths can provide such resources.
Thank you.
We have a few questions.
So let's take a few of them.
The first question is about Apple and Google announcement of how the exposure notification
APIs will mesh with other APIs.
Other Apple and Google have made it very clear that the apps that use exposure notification
API cannot use other sources of information such as GPS, or contact list or photos and
so on.
So this is actually a very good thing because that limits the risk of solutions that may
not preserve privacy.
At the same time, there's a difference in using GPS and photos and other things for
tracking users versus using those signals for creating context.
Ramesh Raskar: So of course we are in conversations with
Apple and Google, and we believe at Safe Paths, that context is very very critical and it's
a great conversation.
So I think the protocols are changing from Apple and Google very rapidly, as you've probably
seen for the last two weeks.
The version one, version 1.1, 1.2 already have, you're seeing great progress.
For example, in previous versions, the notion of signal strength wasn't included.
Now it's included, and there'll be more changes coming in those APS as well.
So we'll continue to monitor that, and of course we will work with Apple, Google to
make sure the initial rollouts adhere to all the privacy principles.
As time goes on we have abilities to include other contexts as well.
In the meantime, Safe Paths will continue to provide solutions where it's even more
secure than the exposure notification API.
Ramesh Raskar: As you can see, a phone that's constantly
emitting a Bluetooth chirp, unfortunately does have some privacy concerns as opposed
to a solution like Safe Paths where the healthy person is only downloading and keeping a private
diary of the GPS location.
So in Safe Paths' opinion, keeping a private diary of GPS is significantly more secure
than any other approach.
So we will provide both solutions going forward.
A solution that uses GPS for private logging, and using information from public health departments.
A second solution that shows, that adheres to current Apple Google exposure notification
APIs.
Over time they will merge as we have a discussion between different parties.
So if you're a government or a public health, public health entity or business, we think
the current Safe Paths solution is probably more secure for the citizens or for employees.
Ramesh Raskar: At the same time, we have a second Safe Paths
app that will have only the Apple, Google exposure notification APIS and we think the
dashboards that we need for public health or for businesses, they will use more information
from the Safe Paths Google [inaudible 00:12:46] Safe Paths GPS app as opposed to the Safe
Paths exposure notification Bluetooth API app.
So again, over time they will merge, but just want to be sure that we have these two solutions.
They'll coexist and they will merge in the next few days.
The next question is about the physical parameters of Bluetooth which is, "Can you limit the
range of Bluetooth to just six feet?"
Unfortunately, as amazing as Bluetooth is for computing proximity, the signal strength
on Bluetooth is only an approximate measure of distance.
Ramesh Raskar: So depending on where you're holding the phone
and where you're holding the phone, is it on the opposite side of the body?
Because the water in human bodies can [inaudible 00:13:36] signal or metal.
So how you hold the phone, where you're holding the phone can completely change the calculation
of distance between two phones.
Also it's not symmetric.
So phone A it makes a particular signal string to phone B. The signals coming from B to A
is not the same.
So that's a proof that you cannot simply take the signal strength as a measure of distance.
Nevertheless, our friends at MIT PACT are looking at this problem very, very thoroughly
at the physical layer and we'll hopefully see many breakthroughs in ability to compute
the distance more and more accurately.
There are other issues with Bluetooth, which is ambient RF interference can actually make
the reception of Bluetooth signals difficult, because it's using the same bandwidth, same
RF bandwidths as rest of the signals that are using this sight.
Ramesh Raskar: It's still the internet bandwidth is also
using the same spectrum.
So you do have issues with RF interference as well, and that's why we believe a combination
of Bluetooth and GPS is more robust than relying on Bluetooth alone.
But nevertheless, Bluetooth is a good indicator approximately and so on.
The specific question was, can you limit the range to just six feet?
There's no way to do that because the phone is broadcasting a Bluetooth signal, and if
you're in an open field with no RF interference, the signal can go to several meters.
But if you are in a very dense region with lots of other RF devices, the range could
reduce significantly.
I think for COVID-19 scenarios, the guidance has been six feet for 10 minutes.
I think Bluetooth is a reasonably good solution for that.
Thank you very much for your questions.