Public Funding for BN Algorithms Limited

The only currently available strategy for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is to physically interrupt the human chain of infection and, for the seriously sick, supportive hospital treatment. Currently this is implemented in the UK through enforced partial isolation of the whole population ("lock-down") which is effective but has a very high social and economic cost. One potential way of reducing these costs ("exit-strategy") is to only isolate people who are likely to be infectious. Testing is inevitably a key part of this, but so is contact tracing, i.e., identifying people likely to have been exposed to the virus and isolating them in advance of any tests or confirmation of symptoms. Digital technology based on mobile phones already plays a key role in contact tracing in China and South Korea, and Apple and Google are rolling-out their contact tracing protocol worldwide in the coming months. Here in the UK, the NHS is working on a mobile-phone based contact tracing app. All of these work by estimating geometric distance between individuals based on radio wave technology (either GPS or Bluetooth). But the COVID-19 virus is transmitted primarily through droplets or aerosols, and so they are missing a key piece information: are droplets/aerosol able to travel from the infectious person to the contact? For example a person standing next to a stationary vehicle is geometrically very close to persons in the vehicle but they can not infect each others as the air is not mixed between the two environments. Discrete, wearable, commercially available, sensors can provide key additional information which can augment the geometric information to significantly improve accuracy of contact-tracing. In particular, relative humidity and air pressure sensors can help determine: 1. If the infectious person and their prospective contact are in an environment where air is well mixed between them (e.g., there are no windows or or other barriers separating them) 2. If the room they are in is well ventilated or not 3. Physical parameters of air which may influence transmissibility of the virus, in particular temperature and relative humidity We are developing the technology to use such sensors to improve contact tracing for COVID-19 and allow all of us to return to our normal lives sooner and with more confidence. Extension for impact for this projects takes the developed technology and successful prototype devices further to create a manufacturing-ready design that can be trialed more widely and scaled-up to mass manufacture.