<aside> ✅ A method for easily contact tracing members of a community during a pandemic using the blockchain
Participant: Nick Tsintolas Idea Name: Blockchain Contact Tracing
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🌱 Trend: Efficient and accurate contact tracing methods are necessary to isolate potentially infected people in a community during a pandemic.
🗺️ Market Box: Universities and local governments
💻 Technology Box: Proof of Work validation on Blockchain
🔥 Hair on Fire Problem: Unfamiliar contacts, forgotten interactions, and complicated exposure criteria can make contact tracing difficult, which puts communities at risk.
🔬 Initial Target Customer: Small universities, such as Duke, that can easily adopt a contact tracing blockchain and register their students onto it.
<aside> 💡 Hypothesis about Solution
When an individual exposed to a virus is asked to complete contact tracing, they must recall who they have seen and where they have been in the past two weeks. It can be difficult to remember every interaction someone has had in a 14-day period, let alone whether that interaction meets certain exposure criteria. For example, the CDC defines exposure to COVID as having been within six feet of someone with COVID for more than 15 minutes. New college students meeting new people face the greater challenge of not having sufficient information about their contacts to forward to contact tracers.
Establishing a contact tracing network on the blockchain could mitigate these issues. Members of the network can be given a certain amount of tokens in their wallet. When two people are near each other, members' phones can automatically interact with one another and complete a proof of work computation that takes 15 minutes, or however long a virus exposure is defined to be. Once this validation is complete, the members' wallets will exchange tokens, a transaction that will be stored on the blockchain. If someone tests positive for a disease, contact tracers will simply access the blockchain and see all the exchanges that person has had in two weeks' time and notify those people of their exposure. Only true exposures will be tracked on the blockchain, and network members will no longer be required to remember every person and place they have seen recently.
The blockchain's ledger must be secure to protect members' privacy and health data, and it must only allow access for valid contact tracers who need the data for public health purposes.
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