smart quarantine czech Archives

eRouska is an app for mobile phones that has been developed to use Bluetooth to track all users of the app with whom you come into contact with.

The app is now also available for iPhone users. eRouška is part of the so-called smart quarantine, a project that involves tracing past contacts of people who test positive for the virus five days back by creating “maps of their movements” with the help of banks and mobile phone operators.

The application, which the Ministry of Health has taken under its patronage should facilitate an easier, faster, and more effective process of looking up people who are at high risk of infection due to contact with an infected person.

Once the users give their permission to the app, phones with activated Bluetooth service can let one another know when they meet. The eRouška application then saves anonymized data into the owner’s phone about mobile devices with the same application which were recently in its vicinity.

If a user’s coronavirus test comes back positive, the phone data can then be used to send anonymized identification numbers of other applications to health officers during an epidemiologic investigation. If once again the user gives permission, only authorized health officers will be able to pair individual identification numbers with phone numbers entered during the registration and then contact potentially infected citizens.

The authors state that the entire eRouška system was designed in accordance with GDPR, and the application is open source which means that anyone can take a look at its code.

„Compared to other solutions which have appeared on the market not just in the Czech Republic but also abroad, eRouška’s advantage is that it doesn’t use collection of location data in order to function, and this saves the phone battery as well,” clarifies Martin Půlpitel from the Information Technology Faculty of CTU and the founder of developer company Ackee.

Starting from Friday, May 1, the smart quarantine system will be fully in place across the Czech Republic.

The project involves tracing past contacts of people who test positive for the virus five days back by creating “maps of their movements” with the help of banks and mobile phone operators.

Czech banks will provide data for the creation of memory maps. The data will be handed over to the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic, which will require it based on the consent of infected people.

The information was provided by the Czech Banking Association (ČBA).

“We are relaxing several strict measures, people are starting to go to work and doing more activities outdoor, shops are opening and we need a system for finding positive cases. The virus has not disappeared, so in order to avoid a higher number of new patients, we have to be able to detect them effectively,” said Prymula.

Smart Quarantine should significantly ease the workload on regional hygiene stations and improve the efficiency of the current sample collection system. “It is a meaningful and important project that is crucial for all of us. Smart Quarantine will replace the universal restrictive measures and speed up our return to normal life,” Minister Vojtěch added.

Smart Quarantine is complemented by the eRouška application, which people can download to their smartphones for free. This is a voluntary tool but can help hygienists more easily and quickly find the people who have recently come into contact with infected people and who are at a high risk of infection. “They just have to download the app and let it run in the background,” said the minister about the app.

“This is a unique project, created through prompt cooperation among the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Defence, the Czech Army, the Integrated Rescue Services of the Czech Republic, and the private sector. We have managed to prepare a project of a scope that would take months, maybe even years, to prepare under normal circumstances, within mere weeks,” Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch said when presenting the project.

The smart quarantine project will be extended to the whole country from Monday.

The project involves tracing past contacts of people who test positive for the virus five days back by creating “maps of their movements” with the help of banks and mobile phone operators.

The solution offered by the Covid19cz group of computer experts. “It generates a memory map showing… for instance that a man spent half an hour at the corner of two streets,” sais Covid19cz spokeswoman Irena Zatloukalova.

“The public health officer can ask if the person visited or met someone to identify other people who may be infected. People won´t have to merely rely on their memory when they recall what they were doing over the last two weeks.”

All those who they came into contact with are tested and quarantined until cleared. The plan is being implemented with the help of the army in order to speed up testing.

The smart quarantine will contribute to the acceleration of activities ensuring population testing and identify new coronavirus cases.

Those who test positive will then describe who they met and where to the Regional Hygiene Authority, and a map will be drawn from this information.

Within three days, everyone who was in contact with the infected person will be contacted. “They will be ordered into a short-term quarantine and the army will arrive within a few hours,” explained Prymula.

“During the first stage of the fight against Coronavirus, across-the-board measures were adopted to stop the virus from spreading unchecked. Fortunately, we did this quickly. It looks as though we have high a chance of levelling out the growth and the curve. We have now moved on to the second stage, which entails replacing the across-the-board measures with the smart-quarantine concept that has been used with success in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other countries,” said Prime Minister Andrej Babiš noted.

On the orders of the government, all data must be permanently deleted after the research has been completed, according to Ondřej Tomáš, one of the system developers. Only epidemiologists will be allowed to access the data.

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