Description: Combating the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic requires the rapid identification of people who have come into recent contact with confirmed cases of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. This allows for timely interventions such as evacuation and disinfection of spaces and for assistance in locating people who have been close to a carrier or have been exposed to the virus, so that they too can be appropriately tested or treated. The CovTracer mobile app works for halting the COVID19 pandemic in Cyprus by facilitating tracing of infected patients and accelerating action-taking. It is available both in Android and iOS. CovTracer supports tracing based on GPS (location tracing) while CovTracer-EN supports tracing based on Bluetooth (contact tracing). It is the official contact tracing mobile app used by the Government of Cyprus and it has more than 10K users.

Collaboration with: Yiorgos Chrysanthou (RISE Research Director), Alessandro, Panayiotis, Melinos, Demetris and Vassos (RISE MRG leaders), Styliani and Marios (RISE Project Managers), Sofronis (UCY Officer), Charis (Municipality of Nicosia), Francesco M Benedetti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT USA)

Techniques used: Mobile computing, pervasive computing, big data analysis, modelling.

Started: March 2020

Status: Finished

Project website:
Bluetooth-based app
GPS-based app

Mobile app:
Bluetooth-based app: Google Play for Android, Apple Store for iOS.
GPS-based app: Google Play for Android, Apple Store for iOS.

Publications:
Philippos Isaia, Christos Laoudias, Andreas Kamilaris and Christos G. Panayiotou, CovTracer-EN: The Ongoing Journey of Covid-19 Digital Contact Tracing in Cyprus, 11th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), Lloret de Mar, Spain, November, 2021.

Christos Laoudias, Marios Raspopoulos, Stefanos Christoforou and Andreas Kamilaris, Privacy-Preserving Presence Tracing for Pandemics Via Machine-to-Machine Exposure Notifications, 2nd IEEE Intl. Workshop on ALgorithms for Indoor Architectures and Systems (ALIAS 2022), Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2022), Paphos, Cyprus, June, 2022.

Other material: Presentation in Slideshare

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union's Emergency Support Instrument programme under grant agreement No. CYPRUS-LC-01591248. This project is supported by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus.