EvoNexus/Futurewei Contact Tracing Webinar 2.0
TB, HIV, Ebola, SARS, H1N1, & now COVID-19
Contact tracing has been a pillar of communicable disease control in public health for decades. The eradication of smallpox was achieved not by universal immunization, but by exhaustive contact tracing to find all infected persons. This was followed by the isolation of infected individuals and immunization of the surrounding community and contacts at-risk of contracting smallpox.
Diseases for which contact tracing is commonly performed include TB, vaccine-preventable infections (e.g. measles), sexually transmitted infections (e.g. HIV), blood-borne infections, Ebola, and novel infections including SARS-CoV, H1N1, and COVID-19.
States are implementing contact tracing. Countries are accelerating efforts on a large scale. Google, Apple, Facebook, Huawei, and others have launched applications to assist in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 Contact Tracing Webinar
EvoNexus, California’s Leading Non-Profit Technology Incubator, and Futurewei, a global leader in wireless technology research and Open Source, are pleased to invite you to a special webinar where COVID-19 contact tracing will be examined as it relates to wearable wireless technology and software applications with a use case impacting our education system, infrastructure, and students.
MedTech, telemedicine, biosensors, and wireless technology have been major focus areas for EvoNexus almost since the incubator’s creation in 2010. Over the past decade, more than 40 healthcare technology startups have been launched out of EvoNexus.
Webinar Panel
Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Professor Farinaz Koushanfar
University of California San Diego, US
Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany) and Professor Farinaz Koushanfar, (University of California San Diego, US) are building a scalable privacy-preserving framework that combines, for the first time, affordable and practicable physiological and physical contact tracing. The latest research results in medical diagnosis establish the effectiveness of physiological monitoring in early detection and prognosis of COVID-19 and other contagious diseases.
A number of recent smartphone apps now provide physical proximity information through GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi; Big corporations including Apple and Google provide COVID-19 OS-level support for iOS and Android. Several governments are now building apps based on big corporate platforms.
The standing challenge addressed by the team is building a first-of-its-kind scalable solution for private and secure tracing via affordable wristbands that combine physical and physiological sensing. Such a solution would allow corporations, government, and educational institutions such as K-12 schools to safely resume their businesses as usual.
Webinar Moderator
