WiFi Technology Traces COVID Cases on Campus

By: Dara Rashwan
@indecisivetho

AUC’s Office of Medical Services has been using Wifi technology to trace suspected and confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a bid to limit the spread of the virus.

In an email sent by the Management & Operations VP Office, they explained that the technology will only help to locate the general proximity of the infected persons to others. This will then help with the manual interview process to determine how often or for how long someone came into contact with an infected person. This technology is used in a strictly confidential manner by the medical services staff.

Some members of the AUC community were worried that the technology would invade their privacy by granting the university access to all the data on their mobile phones.

“Please note that the data collected using WiFi will not provide access to the specific location of the device, private data, microphone or camera,” wrote the Management & Operations VP Office in the initial email sent out to students.

Mohamed El Touhamy, business intelligence extract transform load developer, said that this technology has been in use since mid-September and has proved to be successful as it has traced 60 percent of all cases on campus through the use of WiFi.

This technology is also used by other universities abroad such as Harvard, Purdue, and Ohio State.

The technology includes the 3 Ts strategy – Tracking, tracing and testing. AUC’s daily health check consists of a tracking system which utilizes the WiFi systems in place.

“We are still facing some challenges with the community members sharing the WiFi credentials with others and disconnecting from the AUC WiFi network, these are the top challenges that need to be addressed on multiple levels,” El Touhamy added.

Another challenge was analyzing the data masses to generate a list of people who had come in contact with the infected person. Major system performance enhancing updates were put in place in order to reduce infection detection time from hours to a few minutes.

According to News@AUC, proper tracing leads to testing of suspected individuals.

Heba Attaya, Senior Director of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics, told The Caravan that a lot of research and work took place during the summer period to ensure that AUC remains a healthy and safe environment for everyone that enters campus.

The research uncovered several approaches that used Bluetooth and WiFi based technologies and it also uncovered the many benefits of using this new technology.

“We settled for the WiFi solution as it actually leveraged the existing AUC Wifi infrastructure and the system logs generated that are currently in place without incurring any significant costs,” Attaya said.

The WiFi tracing system is the first big data solution at AUC, therefore there were many challenges in implementing this kind of project.

“With the project from the beginning it was decided that the data would only be available to a very restricted number of people, primarily the clinic because they have more data in terms of health,” Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation Iman Megahed said.

She explained that this technology is the first of its kind at AUC and is a rich platform, although there are stumbling rocks.

“There is a responsibility to leverage this rich platform to the best of our ability, it is our duty to do this and make these things possible,” Megahed said.

Megahed added that this data project was finished in record-breaking time with almost no cost at all to ensure that once students were on campus, people in charge of the project would be able to get back to the person who was in contact with someone who tested positive to give them a heads up.