PRE2019 4 Group10

Authors: Ezra Leeuwenhage, Paulien Teuwen, Yorn Thijssen, Ries van de Ven, Kim Wintraecken

General description of the plan:

In these turbulent times, Corona has been affecting our daily lives. It has been such an impactful disease, that the government had to come up with a solution on how to create awareness of those who have had COVID-19 and those who do not. One of the most widely discussed option in the Netherlands would be a Corona Mobile Application (Corona App).

However, there is still a lot of discussion surrounding this app and its applications. In this project, the possible features will be discussed in a holistic view. The process will be defined by research considering the Corona app, which includes ethical perspectives and their applications and limitations, research into the effectiveness and user-friendliness of the interface of such an app, and research into the State of the Art to see what aspects are already there and which ones could be improved. Following from this, different apps will be created that will be reviewed in specific perspectives to see how different scenarios have various impacts on the features of the app. Based on those results, a final proposal will be made.

Problem statement and objectives

The issue capturing global attention in recent months is the Covid-19 pandemic, causing great disruption throughout the world in both in terms of health care and economy. Many governments have since the outbreak opted for an approach to combat the virus through limiting all social interactions within society (commonly referred to as a lockdown), putting a halt to its spread at the cost of national economy. In the long term this approach is not sustainable however, leading to the need to find ways to reduce restriction on social interaction in all aspects of society without losing grip of the spread of the virus. To this end, the Dutch government has suggested the nation-wide employment of an application designed to predict/ detect infection with Covid-19 of civilians, enabling them to accurately manage the virus’s impact on society without the need for a type of lockdown. The main difficulty of designing this application is not only in the need for an effective app, but also the need for an app that does not violate Dutch privacy legislation. In general, the more data the application can gather and manipulate the higher its effectiveness will be, but the higher the cost in terms of civilian privacy lost. This project will shed light on what kind of application the Dutch government can utilize in combatting the Covid-19 pandemic, balancing the different relevant values of stakeholders.

The objectives of this project will be to determine through literary research what the relevant ethical values are to the problem and what exactly the desired effectiveness of the application is in order to meet its requirements. Finally, the objective of practical research done thereafter will be to determine what type of implementation of the app satisfies the requirements set by the results from literary research.

Who are the users?

Users:

- Smartphone users

- Dutch citizens (who own a smartphone)

Other stakeholders:

- Government

- Public health authorities

- Hospitals

- Healthcare personnel

- Outbreak Management Team

What do they require?

Users require:

- Safety check

- Did I come in contact with anybody who is registered with the virus, or who has recovered from the virus?

- Raise own awareness of spreading possibilities

- How can I prevent the spread of the virus myself?

- Current information about situation

- News-updates

- Latest governmental conferences

- Current national measurements

- Healthcare issues and prevention methods

- How can I protect myself?

- What to do if I need to leave the house for necessity?

Stakeholders require:

- Additional data about the spread of virus

- New data can be used to make estimations or inform the country

Approach, milestones and deliverables

Approach

Solving the problem around the corona app has a difficult set of objectives: first the group should evaluate the existing research about the corona app and the ethical issues that arise when making such an app. Next, requirements should be composed with which the app must comply. Then, two apps are created from particular perspectives of the research. Finally, these apps will be tested, and the results will be compared and analyzed. These results should confirm or deny earlier research and the goal is to determine which type of corona app would be most suitable to achieve the set requirements.

Milestones

A certain milestone is composing the requirements for the corona app. Choosing the requirements depends on the research and the type of app. The requirements must ensure the app is efficient and user friendly. Another milestone would be making the apps interactive for testing.

Week number: Tasks

Week 1: Background study

Week 2: Requirements

Week 3: App 1 (from particular perspective) (make + documentation)

Week 4: App 1 (from particular perspective) (make + documentation)

Week 5: Test App 1 & make App 2 (from particular perspective) (documentation)

Week 6: App 2 (from particular perspective) (make + documentation)

Week 7: Testing (survey) & results & analyzing

Week 8: Final presentation and demo (recorded video)

Deliverables:

The output of the project should be an analysis of two implementations of the corona app. This analysis will be done on two apps. So, another deliverable is the software of these two apps. Furthermore, a wiki page containing all information on the process of the project and the final presentation of week 8 will be delivered.

Who is doing what?

To create a full detailed planning for the hole course is difficult, especially in situations like these where we do not know what we are capable of and things can change every week. Therefore, we have chosen to divided tasks after each meeting or every week just like in an OGO project. These assigned tasks will be published weekly on the wiki in a table. However, to keep track on the schedule, some team members will be assigned to have a leading role over a part in the project. This leading role will consist of managing all tasks and making sure everybody stays on track and finishes their tasks on time.

The leading roles will be as follows:

Part: Student

The research: Kim

App 1: Ries

App 2: Paulien

Results: Ezra

Deliverables: Yorn

Furthermore, because we are doing the project like an OGO project, we also assigned roles for Chairman and Minute taker for each meeting. This will be according to the following schedule:

Meetings per week:  

Monday - 09:30  

Thrusday - after tutoring session 

Date Chairman Minute taker 

27/04 Kim Ries 

30/04 Ries Yorn 

04/05 Yorn Ezra 

07/05 Ezra Paulien 

11/05 Paulien Kim 

14/05 Kim Ries 

18/05 Ries Yorn 

21/05 Yorn Ezra 

25/05 Ezra Paulien 

28/05 Paulien Kim 

01/06 Kim Ries 

04/06 Ries Yorn 

08/06 Yorn Ezra 

11/06 Ezra Paulien 

15/06 Paulien Kim 

18/06 Kim Ries 

Notes on literature

Ries

Looking at the state-of-the-art technology of mobile applications in order to fight the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is one development in particular which seems to be heading in the same and right direction as this very project. There are several mobile applications which are trying to tackle the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and therefor make us of contact tracing [b]. The mobile application TraceTogether is possible the best mobile contact tracing application related to the current pandemic [a].

Not only contact tracing is of great importance, privacy is of equal value, perhaps even more. TraceTogether, however, has serious privacy concerns with respect to the Singapore government [a]. The app shares data by exchanging tokens between nearby phones via a Bluetooth connection. Should an individual be diagnosed with COVID-19, the health organizations will ask the user to release their data, which consists out of this list of tokens gathered from nearby phones [a].

- picture

When infected however, the app provides little to no privacy [a].Their privacy is violated in several ways. Cho, Ippolito and Yu (2020) discussed three notions of privacy: (i) privacy from snoopers, (ii) privacy from contacts, and (iii) privacy from the authorities [a]. Privacy from the authorities is the largest issue being discussed and of the most value to the project regarding privacy.

TraceTogether is mainly relying on the high trust of the Singapore inhabitants in the government. When the data is being shared with the government, mobile phone numbers of all individuals with whom the infected user has been in contact with, can be retrieved by the authorities themselves. Neither the infected user, nor the other individuals, have any privacy from the government [a].

According to Cho, Ippolito and Yu (2020), there is no such way as perfectly privacy from the authorities, however the best way to guarantee the highest privacy is by making use of a possible private messaging system [a], in which the information of the user is being kept from the authorities. Introducing a messaging system which sends messages which make several stops before reaching any of the authorities. The users will be able to decrypt messages from other users by using a public key which have been exchanged while in contact with each other. The message is directly send to proxy servers which will obfuscate mailbox access patterns so any information regarding the user who send a message to another user is discarded [a]. See figure 1 for a visual representation of the scenario presented above. As long as one of the servers is breached, the message cannot be linked to a specific sender [a].

Ultimately, in order for the app to go ‘viral’, it requires the users trust and enthusiasm to install the app. “App adoption must have a higher ‘transmission rate’ than the virus itself” [a]. By mixing in non-governmental entities, such as an academic institution or hospitals, it may increase the users trust and thereby “lower the bar for adoption” [a].

Knowing when two mobile application users have been in contact with each other can be achieved by using a Bluetooth connection. Ionescu et al. (2014) have investigated the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [c]. In their study, BLE is used in order to retrieve lost objects by making use of tags and readers [c]. The system uses StickNFind beacons [c], which sends out a data signal every one hundred milliseconds when paired with another device. In context of contact tracing [b], this may not be as convenient as in the current implementation. However, there could be more investigation into the possible uses of BLE in combination with contact tracing and how this might be more efficient than the method used by the TraceTogether [a] mobile application.

The mobile application should be ready to hit the mobile app stores and therefor it must have lowered the bar for adoption [a]. One way in order to make the application more attractive for download, is to make use of a user-friendly interface. Díaz, López and Fons (2001), introduced a new methodological approach for requirements engineering [d].

By making use of Use Case Models (UCMs) and Message Sequence Charts (MSCs), the method functions as a support tool for Unified Modelling Languages (UML) [d]. Use Case Models are especially of value, as they constitute a complete course of interaction that takes place between an actor and the system [e]. The approach captures requirements of the user using UCMs by using a functional style [d].

Any actual data and numbers regarding the spread of the current COVID-19 pandemic can be found on [f].

Referencing:

[a] Cho, H., Ippolito, D., & Yu, Y. W. (2020). Contact tracing mobile apps for COVID-19: Privacy considerations and related trade-offs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.11511.

[b] Eames, K. T., & Keeling, M. J. (2003). Contact tracing and disease control. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 270(1533), 2565-2571. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2003.2554

[c] Ionescu, G., de la Osa, C. M., & Deriaz, M. (2014). Improving distance estimation in object localisation with bluetooth low energy. SENSORCOMM, 2014, 45-50.

[d] Díaz, J. S., López, O. P., & Fons, J. J. (2001, June). From user requirements to user interfaces: A methodological approach. In International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 60-75). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45341-5_5

[e] Jacobson, I. (1993). Object-oriented software engineering: a use case driven approach. Pearson Education India.

[f] “Novel Coronavirus Map from HealthMap,” March 2020. [Online]. Available: https: //www.healthmap.org/covid-19/