How wireless networks can battle COVID-19
Routinely collected cellphone-location data could be used to alert health official about crowded areas where novel coronavirus could spread rapidly, which they could then use to disperse people in order to lower the risk, according to researchers at Colorado State University.
Mobile phones maintain connections as their users move around by continually handing off from one cell tower to another. Analyzing logs of these handoffs is a way to gauge how many people are in an area, the researchers say, and that information could flag potential virus-spreading hotspots. “Crowded regions with actively moving people are susceptible to spreading the disease,” the team say in an abstract of their paper in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.