App-based contact tracing

App-based Contact Tracing 

May Help Countries Get out of Lockdown

I Lead-in.

a)    Think about the connection between smart devices, such as mobile phones and healthcare. How can mobile phones be used to monitor people’s health?

b)    What applications can assist people in living a better and healthier life? Do you use any of such applications? Would you like to use them in future? Why or why not?

II Vocabulary focus. Match the words to their definitions. Use four words in your sentences.

1) pandemic; 2) to deploy; 3) to track; 4) device; 5) record; 6) ubiquity; 7) software; 8) to notify; 9) simultaneously; 10) planet-spanning; 11) string

a)    computer programs and instructions

b)    an object or machine invented for a specific purpose

c)    covering the area of the whole planet

d)    disease that infects people over a large geographic area  

e)    presence everywhere at the same time

f)     to follow a person and find their location

g)    a series of related objects

h)    at the same time

i)      a piece of stored information

j)     to officially inform about something

k)    to use something effectively

III Follow the link below or the hyperlinks in the text. Focus on the words andexpressions (study definitions), match the terms to their definitions, solve the crossword puzzle, complete the quiz, chase down the correct answer to earn points, unscramble words and phrases (correct order of letters), type in words to fill in the blanks, test your knowledge of  vocabulary.

https://www.studystack.com/flashcard-3215505

IV Look through the article. Six sentences have been removed. Read the article and choose from the sentence (A-H) the one which fits each gap (1-6). There are two sentences which you do not need to use.

On April 10th Apple and Google did something unusual: they announced plans to work together. These two firms exert varying degrees of control over almost every smartphone on Earth – Apple through its production of iPhones and the software that runs them, and Google thanks to a range of programs found in nearly all of the Android-powered devices. 1)______________ . Their plan is to combine their assets to assist the tracking of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tracing who is infected is essential to controlling the transmission of SARS-COV-2, the virus causing the pandemic—and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes them probable agents for doing so. 2)______________. Bluetooth lets nearby devices communicate. The unification means it will be easier for others to build contact-tracing apps that work, without modification, on either platform.

America, Britain, Germany, Ireland and many other countries will now rewrite their software to track infection to take advantage of this new arrangement. 3)______________. These broadcasts will be detectable by any other phone within Bluetooth range (about nine metres) that has the same app installed. An app will also, simultaneously, listen for strings that other phones are broadcasting. For reasons of security, the string of characters a phone broadcasts will change every 15 minutes. Also the records of strings received will be stored only on the receiving phone. 4)______________.

If a phone-user develops symptoms and then tests positive for Covid-19, different strings of characters will be broadcast by the authorities to every other app in the network. These strings, which Apple calls diagnosis keys, command all apps in the network to search records collected since that person’s time of infection. The system will look for signs that show if the people in the network were close to the infected individual’s phone and had contacts with the infected individual.

When the app finds out that a person in the network had contacts with the infected individual, the system will notify the person of interest. 5)______________. This way, infections will be detected quickly, and infected individuals offered advice and possibly quarantined.

6)______________. In Singapore government rolled out a contact-tracing app, TraceTogether, on March 20th. So far this has been downloaded by only a sixth of the country’s population. However, epidemiologists believe that 60% of the population need the app to make it effective in breaking the local epidemic. Perhaps the most used contact-tracing app in the world is that deployed by Iceland. Yet it is used by only 40% of the country’s 364,000 people. If such a small place cannot reach the required 60% download rate, what hope is there for large, diverse ones like America?

As well as developing high-tech networks for tracking infection, information-technology firms should therefore also be writing software that improves the productivity of human contact-tracers. Interview forms for potential contacts, visualisation dashboards for relevant data, telemedicine for remote diagnostics—all these would be useful. Apps built using Apple’s and Google’s new protocol ought to focus on providing information to human contact-tracing teams, not on automating the whole process.

A.   That makes hacking the system hard.

B.   Without these, there will be no information to feed back into the app network about who may be spreading the virus.

C.   The app will ask him or her to get in touch with healthcare professionals and arrange to be tested.

D.   The two firms’ networks will be joined together by a unifying update to their Bluetooth short-range wireless protocols.

E.   As a result, the two companies have access to a planet-spanning network of sensors and computing power.

F.   They did this without resort to Bluetooth tracking apps, albeit that their ability to scrutinise the data they needed required the invocation of national-emergency powers.

G.  This scenario is possible only if phone users adopt the app.

H.  These apps will work by broadcasting, from each phone they are installed on, a string of numbers and letters unique to that device.

V Match the words from two columns to make collocations used in the text. Use four collocations in your sentences.

1.	Android-powered	A.	advantage of
2.	have	B.	touch with
3.	computing	C.	rate
4.	work on	D.	access to
5.	to take	E.	app
6.	for reasons	F.	firms
7.	to get in	G.	devices
8.	healthcare	H.	information
9.	contact-tracing	I.	of security
10.	download	J.	diagnostics
11.	information-technology	K.	power
12.	remote	L.	professionals
13.	provide	M.	either platform

VI Comprehension check. Answer the questions.

1 What two companies want to work together on developing an app to help track Covid-19 spread?

2 What will the app analyse? How will it track Covid-19 spread?

3 What measures will the developers take to prevent hacking the system?

4 Will the new app be used by all population in all  countries? What examples of similar apps does the article list? Were the apps used successfully by all the population?

5 What percentage of the population should download the app to help track Covid-19 spread in a country?

6 Should IT companies try to automate the process of tracking infection? At what stages should or should not human analysis be used?

7 What other types of software used by healthcare specialists and analytics are mentioned in the article?

VII OVER TO YOU. Think about the application described in the article and discuss the potential of its development and use in your country. Focus on the following questions: A) How effective in your opinion would such app be to track the spread of Covid-19 in your country? B) Would many people download and use this app on their phones? C) What problems can the use of the application described in the article help to solve in your country? D) What alternative high-tech solutions for the problem of monitoring and controlling pandemic can you suggest?