An Incentivized Crowdsourcing Network for Contact Tracing

It is a well-known fact that contact tracing is an effective mechanism for identifying and isolating “at risk” individuals from population who came in contact with infected individuals. In this paper, the authors propose a contact tracing mechanism which uses smartphones to automatically establish contact between their owners when they are in close proximity to each other. On the backend of the mechanism, a graph data structure is maintained where the vertices of the graph denote the individuals and the edges denote contact between them. This allows for not only maintaining information about direct contact between individuals but also maintains secondary contact information and helps in clustering. Since the maximum possible engagement is required from users to generate the best results, therefore, an incentive model is also discussed in the paper to provide “rewards” to users depending on their level of engagement.

Keywords:

contact tracing , mobile network , crowdsourcing , incentive mechanism