IntelliTrace: Intelligent Contact Tracing Method Based on Transmission Characteristics of Infectious Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the necessity for rapid contact tracing as a means to effectively suppress the spread of infectious diseases. Existing contact tracing methods leverage location-based or distance-based detection to identify contact with a confirmed patient. Existing contact tracing methods have encountered challenges in practical applications, stemming from the tendency to classify even casual contacts, which carry a low risk of infection, as close contacts. This issue arises because the transmission characteristics of the virus have not been fully considered. This study addresses the above problem by proposing IntelliTrace, an intelligent method that introduces methodological innovations prioritizing shared environmental context over physical proximity. This approach more accurately assesses potential transmission events by considering the transmission characteristics of the virus, with a special focus on COVID-19. In this study, we present space-based indoor Wi-Fi contact tracing using machine learning for indoor environments and trajectory-based outdoor GPS contact tracing for outdoor environments. For an indoor environment, a contact is detected based on whether users are in the same space with the confirmed case. For an outdoor environment, we detect contact through judgments based on the companion statuses of people, such as the same movements in their trajectories. The datasets obtained from 28 participants who installed the smartphone application during a one-month experiment in a campus space were utilized to train and validate the performance of the proposed exposure-detection method. As a result of the experiment, IntelliTrace exhibited an F1 score performance of 86.84% in indoor environments and 94.94% in outdoor environments.