Taipei, Taiwan- May 11, 2020
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak continues to evolve, it persists to cause economic and social hardships across the globe. Since mid-January, Groundhog Technologies has continued to leverage its expertise in subscribers’ mobility modeling to offer a contact tracing pilot product through location tracking within the mobile network. With the advancements on infection analysis and contact tracing, the company has expanded the functionality of RealMotion™ for the purpose of supporting public health entities to promptly respond to the urgent need in containing COVID-19.
COVID-19 can be transmitted from not only symptomatic but also pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people infected with the respiratory virus. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said somewhere between 25% and 50% of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic [1]. The large numbers of silent spreaders bring major challenges in stopping the pandemic. Except for wide-scale rapid testing and vaccines, contact tracing through mobile phone location data has been aggressively used in many countries as a successful effort to limit the COVID-19 spread. This can be achieved to different extents through utilizing contact-tracing apps or network-based Geolocation data. The choice of the above method is dependent on the country and its regulations.
Groundhog Technologies has decades of experience in leveraging ubiquitous mobile networks to provide high-quality nationwide location data. With this expertise, its RealMotion™ built on top of the network-based Mobility Intelligence platform can empower governments, telecoms, and public health experts to conduct a holistic assessment of COVID-19 impact. The public health solution applies sophisticated modeling techniques based on powerful and reliable geolocation data to highlight the location of potential new outbreaks and risk profiles. From subscriber attributes, traffic dynamics to public health measures, RealMotion™ reveals clear subscriber insights through multiple use cases; including Subscriber Density, Inbound Traveller Monitoring, Group Gathering, Quarantine Violation, Lockdown Compliance, etc.
The RealMotionTM solution geolocates coronavirus cases and traces their travel history (so-called Infection Footprint) for contact tracking. It also provides additional analyses, such as asymptomatic carrier identification and risk estimation. Through multi-level cross-checking of the diagnosed patients against their contact history, RealMotionTM helps to identify the potential infection sources of the confirmed cases, risk levels of people on the contact lists, and the potential asymptomatic carriers. For example; persons not yet tested for the disease but appear on more than one patient’s contact lists have a higher risk of being infected. They also have a higher probability of being asymptomatic carriers if the lists of the patients do not include any known patient besides himself or herself. Such rule-based machine learning can contribute to the rapid identification and estimation provided by RealMotionTM to help prioritize testing and manage the transmission from existing infected cases. Corresponding medical resources and measures can also be assigned appropriately with the analysis of confirmed and suspected cases’ movement patterns.
Today, RealMotion™ has been implemented and running in many Asian and Middle Eastern countries such as Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and India [2] for public or private sector clients. The company is striving to help manage the outbreak in the shortest time frame, providing the flexibility of two types of location data feeds – Geolocation data and Call Detail Record (CDR), as well as supports integration into clients’ legacy systems for in-depth COVID-19 analysis. “With our technologies which analyze the pattern of subscribers’ mobility both spatially and temporally, we are here to help,” said David Chiou, the Founder and CEO of Groundhog Technologies.
Groundhog Technologies is ready to assist more governments and operators in stopping COVID-19. Contact Groundhog Technologies at https://www.ghtinc.com/alliance-request/ to take critical next steps.
About Groundhog Technologies
Groundhog Technologies is the leading provider of Mobility Intelligence. Our solutions can reveal the locations, Quality of Experience (QoE), context, and lifestyles of all mobile users in the operator’s entire network 24×7. This carrier-grade platform continuously transforms billions of daily network events and petabytes of data into ubiquitous intelligence. This invaluable knowledge empowers our partners to improve services and generate new revenue streams across various departments: Network & Operations, Customer Experience, Sales & Marketing, Digital Services, and now being extended to the Public Health domain. Since 2001, Groundhog Technologies has been helping the foremost operators in the world to maximize their network and business potential.
References
- Between 25% and 50% of people who get the coronavirus may show no symptoms, Fauci says. Here’s the latest research on asymptomatic carriers https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-carriers-transmit-without-symptoms-what-to-know-2020-4
- Mozark: DoT’s contact tracking platform developer plans to work with SAARC nations to combat COVID-19 pandemic https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/mozark-dots-contact-tracking-platform-developer-plans-to-work-with-saarc-nations-to-combat-covid-19-pandemic/75596597