LBTrace: A LoRa and Blockchain Based Contact Tracing Method for COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

COVID-19 has caused hundreds of millions of infections and hundreds of deaths, and even though vaccinations are increasing, the mutation of the virus makes the pandemic even difficult to control. Existing manual, operator and Bluetooth-based technologies for epidemiological investigation and close contact tracing suffer from high cost, low accuracy, and difficulty in scaling up. Viruses such as Delta variants have a greater ability to survive and spread, making many of the existing human-human close contacts tracing less effective. Also, it is easy to overlook the fact that there is still a large segment of the world's population that does not have access to the Internet and is proficient in using smartphones, which makes the performance of smart device-based tracing much less effective. Inspired by Health Code and Tracetogether, which have been widely accepted in China and Singapore, we propose a LoRa and blockchain-based contact tracing method LBTrace, which is low-power, lightweight, and operation-free. The experimental results demonstrate the high stability and accuracy of our proposed method, which can be used as a complement to existing methods to help some governments effectively control COVID-19 and future outbreaks under certain emergency conditions.