The New York Times tags Microshare as global leader in wearable contact tracing solution

As Wall Street Journal affirms smartphone apps are failing, Universal Contact Tracing without smartphones is the way forward

By Michael Moran

PHILADELPHIA, June 24 – In a comprehensive report on how the world’s offices, factories and other facilities are preparing to reopen after global COVID-19 shutdowns, The New York Times this week featured Microshare as the leading example of how to secure a workforce with Universal Contact Tracing that does not depend on unreliable smartphone technology.

In a week that also saw the Wall Street Journal affirm that the Apple-Google smartphone app-based approach is failing badly, The Times quoted Microshare CEO and Co-Founder Ron Rock extolling the virtues of using a simpler, less expensive and more reliable solution based on wearable Bluetooth and LoRaWAN technology.

“Asking you to put something on my phone, that’s a really slippery slope,” said Rock in an interview that appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s print edition of The New York Times. “You start to come up against: Is somebody going to the bathroom too often? Is somebody going to the cafeteria too often? Is somebody smoking too much? Is somebody in parts of the building where they don’t belong?”

Getting the balance between privacy and safety right has been a focus of Microshare for years, and never has that balance been more important – or more in the public view – than with contact tracing. From the launch of Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing solution in late March, the company has made it clear that app-based solutions not only have severe problems of performance and practicality, but also potentially open up those who download such apps to security and privacy violations.

Earlier this week, Microshare released an animation that demonstrates how Universal Contact Tracing works. The solution provides anonymized, searchable contact data in workplaces and other environments where social distancing alone may not be enough. Microshare deployments are planned in factories, mines, airports, dormitories, universities, corporate campuses, prisons and other facilities.

Microshare deploys Bluetooth-based, long-battery life wearables that avoid the many pitfalls of using smartphone apps, which are vulnerable to privacy and security breaches, subject to battery failure or user disabling, and are impractical or forbidden in some environments. Indeed, smartphones that are ubiquitous among wealthy western consumers are not universally adopted in the developing world, where they remain an expensive luxury.

Universal Contact Tracing has drawn huge interest from industrial and government entities in the developing world, where smartphones simply are not a practical way forward. Reuters recently reported that the government of Singapore was weighing whether Microshare’s solution could fix the problems it and other nations have had trying to contact trace using smartphone apps.

The Microshare approach, which uses LoRaWAN™ low-power, wide-area gateways rather than expensive cell phone or less accurate global positioning system (GPS) data. Universal Contact Tracing operates with Bluetooth beacons embedded in wristbands or badges. The gateways are positioned around a facility to receive and provide a secure data backhaul that creates a historic database of contact events.

Should a diagnosis of COVID-19 affect an occupant of a given building, building owners can run a reverse query and identify where contact events took place and can choose to recommend that the affected people self-quarantine and seek medical advice or any other action dictated by their own policies or by local regulators. The system also indicates which rooms affected people occupied and these rooms, and only these rooms, are designated for disinfection and deep cleaning, minimizing disruption.

Universal Contact Tracing was featured on the front page of the Financial Times on April 27, part of a wave of attention to its innovative technology that has boosted global exposure and sales for the Philadelphia-based “data-as-a-service” company.

“There’s a realization that the smartphone app approach will not work in some cases, including a mine or a military barracks or a busy factory where smartphones are a dangerous distraction,” says Charles Paumelle, Microshare Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer and the engineer behind Universal Contact Tracing. “And in poorer regions of the world or among the elderly, smartphones are not present. And even when people do own them, there’s a lot of pushback against downloading an app that is going to trace you. So this approach is also vulnerable to individual users switching off their GPS or forgetting to carry their smartphones, or even their batteries draining and dying, leaving them untraced. Our approach does not collect any Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and we think that’s the way to go.”