University of Arizona officials announced this week they plan to provide a smartphone app to students and staff members who return to campus in the fall, enabling them to notify the school community of potential exposure to COVID-19.
The app, called Covid Watch, was developed by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Waterloo in Canada, and is designed to be an alternative to digital contact tracing.
Covid Watch is one of several apps available or under development to help limit the spread of COVID-19. The apps are seen as potentially important to controlling the pandemic, while also protecting the privacy of users — which has been a principal objection from some people.
Instead of informing a central authority of COVID-19 exposure status, Covid Watch works by notifying others who may have been exposed directly using random numbers exchanged by local Bluetooth signals, University of Arizona officials said.
The system also preserves users’ anonymity and protects their personal data, they said.
“If the testing phase goes well, we plan to launch the app for the entire campus community, and if enough people in the campus community choose to alert each other of their exposure and follow the general guidance, community spread can be stopped,” Joyce Schroeder, chair of the department of molecular and cellular biology at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
Approximately 56 percent of university students and staff members would need to opt into the system for it to effectively control community spread on campus, she said.
