Amid the pandemic scare, when every country is trying their level best to come across a solution that allows beating the pandemic, Ireland’s health authority has decided to launch the coronavirus contact-tracing app based on Apple and Google’s technology.
It has been stated that the Health Service Executive would submit a memo to the government this week, and “subject to approval”, they would launch the app.
This step was taken into consideration after there have been concerns related to the tech’s accuracy. In this run, the UK and Germany are also making the app as per the guideline of Apple & Google technology.
How far is the app secured?
There have already been two tests also have been carried out in Ireland, much before the launch of its app. Also, the members of the Garda Siochana police are being forced, to volunteer to participate in field trials at the start of the month to understand how it would perform in everyday situations. This result has offered confidence to roll out the app to the public.
This app has been designed to support UK mobile numbers, letting visitors cross the border from Northern Ireland or traveling across from Great Britain.
Also, there has been carried out the second experiment involved a team at Trinity College, Dublin testing an app based on the Google-Apple API to check the app on a commuter bus.
Further, the researchers have stated signal strength was sometimes higher for phones that were far apart than those close together. This provides some reliable proximity-detection “hard or perhaps even impossible” to achieve.
On the other hand, Prof Doug Leith stated, “As to whether it is sensible to deploy these apps, I’d say the jury is still out on that, but the likely effectiveness of apps based on the Apple-Google API in real-world situations -ie outside the lab – is certainly far from clear.”
Many other countries are following this approach
There are many other countries, the UK ditched its own contact-tracing technology and decided to switch to the Apple-Google model. However, the government now aims to launch a Covid-19 app of some type in England by the Autumn, and it may still not include contact-tracing functionality.
On the other hand, Apple and Google are under constant pressure to be less restrictive about the data, which has been shared to let apps become more accurate.
Dr. Brendan Jennings mentioned, “The API does not expose Bluetooth received signal strength (RSS) measurements directly, rather it abstracts this. There certainly are some changes in the API that we believe would be helpful – and we do believe that Google/Apple will be willing to take on board suggested changes in future revisions.”
Different countries that have already decided to launch apps based on the two US tech firms:
- Denmark
- Uruguay
- Germany
- Gibraltar
- Japan
- Latvia
- Poland
- Italy
- Saudi Arabia
- Switzerland
It has been stated that one of the developers of Germany’s app has found that it was currently 80% accurate. It brings further logging matches across a range of scenarios, and that makes the user experience a seamless journey.
In a nutshell…
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