High-resolution contact networks: from wearable sensors to contact tracing apps
- Prof. Ciro Cattuto, University of Torino & ISI Foundation
Digital technologies provide the opportunity to quantify specific human behaviors with unprecedented levels of detail and scale. Personal electronic devices andwearable sensors, in particular, can be used to map the network structure of human close-range interactions in a variety of settings relevant for research incomputational social science, epidemiology, and public health.In particular, such technologies become particularly valuable in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, to support contact tracing efforts.This talk will review the experience of the SocioPatterns collaboration, an ongoing international effort aimed at measuring and studying high-resolution human social networks using wearable proximity sensors.We will discuss how the lessons learned from the SocioPatterns experience can help us to design efficient, privacy-preserving, smartphone-based contact tracing systems.