COVID-19 tracer: passive close-contacts searching through wi-fi probes: poster abstract

COVID-19 outbreaks rapidly around the world, which is the enemy faced by all humankind. Since COVID-19 is mainly spread through close personal contact, searching close-contacts is key to controlling this virus's spread. This paper designs COVID-19 Tracer, a novel low-cost passive system for searching COVID-19 patients' close-contacts. Utilizing ubiquitous Wi-Fi probe requests, COVID-19 Tracer can quickly determine whether a person stays in one small space with a COVID-19 patient in the same period. Furthermore, it seeks to find out a close-contact with a novel rang-free judgment algorithm for location similarity. Finally, extensive experiments conducted in a school office building show our system's good performance, and the accuracy in finding out close-contacts is more than 98%.