Origin Story: Setu Mera Bodyguard
On 2nd March 2020, two new cases of coronavirus were reported in India and within a week the number of patients increased to 50. To prevent the spread of virus, state governments started manual contact tracing and published patient flow charts on social media to inform people about the whereabouts of the infected people.
If anyone was at the same location and approximately at the same time as of the infected person, people were asked to home quarantine and report to state government in case of any symptoms of COVID-19.
Problems with Manual Contact Tracing
The accuracy of the flow chart depends on the recollection of an individual and also puts others at risk who are talking to individual after the person is infected.
Reach of the flowchart to the people will depend on the mediums through which it is circulated.
Both the activities of creating a flow chart and then reaching out the first degree contacts of the infected person is time consuming.
Manual activity of creating the contact tracing graph was only possible if the cases are very limited. Given the viral nature of the disease it was not scalable to continue with this approach beyond a point.
Aarogya Setu was born
To solve the problems of accuracy and scale, there was a need of technology intervention.
How does Aarogya Setu work?
Aarogya Setu uses contact tracing to record details of all the people you may have come in contact with, as you go about your normal activities. If any one of them, at a later point in time, tests positive for COVID-19, you are immediately informed and proactive medical intervention can be arranged for you.
By early identification and prevention of potential risk of infection in you and others, Aarogya Setu enables better safety for those around you, acting as a shield of protection for all your loved ones.
Permissions required for Aarogya Setu to work
We needed the technology which can record interactions over a short distance and is available in most of the smart phones.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low power wireless communication technology that can be used over a short distance to enable smart devices to communicate.
Capturing interactions alone were not sufficient. Once we know the person is at risk, providing medical help is also important. Appropriate State and District authorities need to be alerted for proactive medical intervention.
This has also helped state government in predicting the hotspots in advance and plan accordingly.
Security and Privacy Features
- Random Unique ID (DID) for each user: We assign a unique ID to each user upon registration. This ID is used for subsequent interactions between devices or between client & server.
- No/limited Background Chatter: Once the registration is complete. No personal data is sent to server. Only few actions like self-assessment, and viewing near by statistics require location to be sent to server.
- Local Device Storage: All the contact tracing data is kept on user’s device. Data is sent to the server only if the person is tested COVID-19 positive or the user voluntarily pushes the data using the “Share Data with Govt.” option.
- Encrypted data storage at Rest: All critical data like user location is encrypted on client and backend servers.
- Time to Live(TTL) of data at Rest: All data is deleted from client and server as per the time defined in the privacy policy of the App.
- Location jitter: We add location jitters to fetch near by statistics, so that any user can find out the exact data by doing the triangulation attack.
- Secure Client Backend interactions
Your Shield For a Safer India: Download Now
129M+ Aarogya Setu users are already united in their fight against COVID-19 through community driven contact tracing. Join them now to make India safer and healthier!
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