Engineers at Tecnun develop an algorithm to avoid unnecessary geographical confinement.

To avoid geographical confinement using this algorithm, all that remains to be done today is to develop the application for mobile phones and for governments to show interest in its implementation.

Engineers at Tecnun, the School of Engineering of the University of Navarra, have developed an algorithm to avoid unnecessary geographical confinement and group individuals according to their social contacts and level of risk of severe covid-19 disease.

The work, recently published in the IEEE(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Access magazine, a scientific journal of reference letter on the advancement of technology, is based on the fact that the possibility of contagion is related to the social contacts of individuals, which, due to geographic mobility, are not necessarily related to the geographic area of residence.  

"Countries, autonomous communities or entire cities are confined on the basis of an average number of cases among the inhabitants and this puts a brake on all economic activities. Instead of confining entire geographic regions, the algorithm allows pandemic control measures to affect, according to the risk of serious disease, groups of people who have had contact among them, thus reducing social and economic damage," said Xabier Insausti, one of the researchers in the Mathematical Principles group at Tecnun who led the work.

It should be noted that the algorithm groups individuals from agreement with the information available at the time of its execution allowing adaptive control of the pandemic. "Social contacts change continuously without even being aware of it and the level of risk of severe disease also changes with the progress of vaccination," clarified the researcher of Tecnun, Marta de Zárraga.

Also, unlike other unsuccessful applications such as "Radar Covid", the privacy of user data is maintained . "Privacy concerns have been the biggest deterrent to installing pandemic control applications. In the case of our algorithm, it has been achieved that there is no need to store data anywhere or share it globally. The only thing that each individual knows is the epidemiological status of the group to which they belong and this allows them to take the corresponding prevention or social distancing measures", said Carolina Nolasco, a 4th year student of Telecommunication Systems Engineering at Tecnun and co-author of the work.

To avoid geographical confinement using this algorithm, all that remains to be done today is to develop the application for mobile phones and for governments to show interest in its implementation.