Awesome

Introduction

This is a basic skeleton app with Bluetooth beacon functionality to assist easy development of contact tracing apps. The concept of human contact tracing using Bluetooth BLE beacons to fight corona virus was first introduced by the Singapore Government. This code repo can help other institutions and Governments easily develop such an app.

Link to TraceTogether app by Singapore Gov

News Coverage latimes channelnewsasia

Details of this Repo

What does this app do

When you launch the app, it assigns a random ID to the device which starts getting advertised around as BLE beacon. At the same time, it listens to nearby devices that are using this app and displays their ID.

Features

Converts own device into ble bluetooth beacon
Displays and listens to all the nearby apps using this app
Works in background (using foreground service)
Uses Eddystone BLE protocol (can easily be customized to use other protocols eg. IBeacon)
Eddystone BLE beacon can be scanned by IOS devices too

Screenshot

Library Used

AltBeacon Github

Future possible optimization

Battey optimization

Other possible ways to doing contact tracing as our understanding and their issues

Scanning nearby Bluetooth devices and getting their mac addresses Issue- > Android doesn't allow to read own Bluetooth mac address programmatically so phone number and own mac address cannot be mapped
Google nearby to scan and broadcast id Issue -> Cannot run nearby in the background

Contribution

Feel Free to share your ideas and you can always add more functionalities to code and do a pull request.