Enhanced technology to be used in enhanced quarantine ‒ Eleazar
THE police and military use advanced technologies in the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), Philippine National Police (PNP) LtGen. Guillermo Eleazar said on Saturday.
According to Eleazar, commander of the Joint Task Force (JTF) Covid Shield, the technologies are scalable for a selective or a total ECQ implementation.
One technology is called Safe Paths, a privacy-centered “rapid and unique” contact tracing app that utilizes global positioning system (GPS) and Bluetooth proximity technologies, Eleazar said.
When the app is introduced for downloading, the tech tracks the GPS position of a user’s smartphone every 5 minutes for 28 days. When an app user contracts the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), he or she submits his or her location tracking to the Department of Health (DoH). After redaction or removal of personal information, the GPS logs of the infected user are uploaded to the DoH database, said Eleazar, who assured the public of privacy as no other data is extracted from smartphones.
Other users of Safe Paths receive color-coded status alerts whenever they come in contact with an infected user, bared Eleazar.
A green circle means no close contact, and a yellow one means close contact with a Covid-positive user, requiring self-quarantine or testing for Covid-19 “if they have symptoms,” Eleazar elaborated. At checkpoints, travelers show the color status on their smartphones in order to pass through. Mobile JTF teams also perform random checks on pedestrians.
Safer PH Innovations Inc., a software design and development company, is set to introduce a way to track, process and inform thousands who come in close contact with infected users on a daily basis. In the meantime, the standard method is manual contact tracing, which involves calling close contacts one by one, according to Eleazar.
Geo-temporal analysis of the movement patterns of infected persons and their close contacts allows the JTF to formulate containment strategies.
A self-contained and integrated control vehicle is set up as the mobile command center (MCC) of the JTF “to support its implementation of focused containment strategies.”
The PNP Highway Patrol Group (HPG) uses the MCC bus to monitor and synchronize nationwide containment operations at dedicated control points (DCPs). The bus features the Collaboration and Operations Management System to support multiagency security and public-safety coordination.
JTF Covid Shield teams are deployed with 500 units of highly secured Samsung smartphones, installed with a mission essential app suite called Android Tactical Awareness Kit (ATAK).
Another app the JTF uses is ZelloWork, which turns the smartphone into a secure digital PTT or press-to-talk application that is utilized in unison with a body camera.
The body camera transmits streaming video feeds to the DCPs, ATAK smartphones and MCC bus while JTF teams communicate via the secure PTT channel, Eleazar explained.
Inside the MCC bus are several sophisticated drones that stream videos to authorized smartphones. Drones blast an “unnerving alarm” similar to the siren in the movie The Purge. After the alarm, a warning in Filipino admonishes people to stay at home. “These drones are equipped with thermal imaging that allows them to fly at night,” Eleazar added.
Other apps tapped include mobile license-plate recognition, composite sketching and systems for incident and traffic-violation reporting, among others.
Furthermore, a Mobile Government (MGOV) system provides online virtual identification for vulnerability mapping and for the Automated Nationwide Tracking of Infected persons ‒ Close contact Observation, Vulnerable persons Identification and Decontamination (Anti-Covid) initiative.