Supporting the Contact Tracing Process with WiFi Location Data: Opportunities and Challenges

ABSTRACT Contact tracers assist in containing the spread of highly infectious diseases such as COVID-19 by engaging community members who receive a positive test result in order to identify close contacts. Many contact tracers rely on community member’s recall for those identifications, and face limitations such as unreliable memory. To investigate how technology can alleviate this challenge, we developed a visualization tool using de-identified location data sensed from campus WiFi and provided it to contact tracers during mock contact tracing calls. While the visualization allowed contact tracers to find and address inconsistencies due to gaps in community member’s memory, it also introduced inconsistencies such as false-positive and false-negative reports due to imperfect data, and information sharing hesitancy. We suggest design implications for technologies that can better highlight and inform contact tracers of potential areas of inconsistencies, and further present discussion on using imperfect data in decision making.