Gyeonggi Province Develops App Comparing COVID-19 Patients' Routes with Users' Routes to Assess Contact Risk

[Suwon Ilbo=Park No-hoon Reporter] Gyeonggi Province, in cooperation with Seoul National University, is providing a 'COVID-19 Contact Risk Alert Service' that compares disclosed routes of confirmed COVID-19 cases with users' own routes and informs them of contact risk levels.

Gyeonggi Province began pilot service testing on the 18th targeting public officials and some residents of the province, and announced on the 24th that it plans to provide full service from February after improving functions and performance during the pilot service period.

This service compares disclosed routes of confirmed cases with users' routes over the past two weeks to assess and notify risk levels. The disclosed routes are provided based on the 'In-depth Epidemiological Investigation Report DB,' which Gyeonggi Province recently developed as a national first, and once users install the app, their personal routes are stored in their smartphones using GPS. Users can check the possibility of route overlap either once a day or at any time, depending on their preference.

The 'COVID-19 Contact Risk Alert Service,' developed by Seoul National University's Industrial Mathematics Research Center (Director Cheon Jung-hee), applies 'homomorphic encryption' technology to encrypt personal location information and store it in encrypted form on users' own smartphones, then compare it with confirmed case routes without decryption, so there is no concern about personal information exposure.

Only five organizations worldwide possess the original technology for homomorphic encryption—Microsoft (MS), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and others—and Seoul National University is the only one in Korea.

While the existing 'Safety Notice SMS' and 'Confirmed Case Route Information' raised residents' anxiety and SMS fatigue through one-way simple information provision, the significance of the 'COVID-19 Contact Risk Alert Service' lies in its ability to encourage individual residents to actively check risk levels and voluntarily participate in quarantine and diagnostic testing for epidemic prevention activities.

Lim Moon-young, the Province's Deputy Governor for Future Growth Policy, said, "Confirmed case information and route information are currently being provided by SMS with only minimal information according to information disclosure guidelines aimed at minimizing privacy violations and economic damage to small business owners, which has increased message fatigue among residents and lowered interest in routes," adding, "At this time, we hope that this service, which combines epidemic prevention data held by Gyeonggi Province with IT technology from universities and cutting-edge venture companies, will encourage residents themselves to actively participate in epidemic prevention activities and reduce residents' anxiety and inconvenience."

Meanwhile, the 'COVID-19 Contact Risk Alert' app can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store for iOS devices and from Google Play for Android devices around the second week of February.