New Digital App Set to Transform the Landscape of Contact Tracing Practices

LONDON, Wales - April 14, 2020 - PRLog -- In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, UK company, Vestigo has launched a new website to promote its efforts to develop a digital tracing app called Dot2Dot and test the prototype within the next few weeks.

Dot2Dot will digitise the manual contact tracing procedures utilised by health professionals, making those processes more efficient and less costly by harnessing AI capabilities and social network tracing to maximise the effectiveness of the process. It will mean more contacts can be traced than through current manual practices, at pace and at a lower cost.

The digital contact tracing app, which is at development stage, will primarily be of use in the war against Tuberculosis, but could help health authorities with other infectious diseases.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB, currently infects one-quarter of the world's population, with a 5–15% lifetime risk of falling ill from the disease.

Current contact tracing for the disease is conducted using paper-based questions to try and establish a history of movements. However, this process is flawed – paper records are error-prone, not centralised, and there is too much dependence on human interpretation.

Dot2Dot removes the need for paper-based questionnaires and digitises contact tracing to eliminate errors and make the whole process of infectious disease control much more efficient.

Martin Green, co-founder of Vestigo, said: "Digital contact tracing has the potential to revolutionise the process by which a health authority identifies people who might have been in contact with a person carrying an infectious disease.

"When combined with isolation of infected individuals, contact tracing can be very effective in containing and stopping a disease outbreak."

Martin said: "The most effective way to delay the spread of an infectious disease is to apply accurate, effective and efficient contact tracing as soon as an initial index case is identified.

"The current models for contact tracing are antiquated and too subjective. As a result, practice is inconsistent and dependent on the competency of individual practitioners. Contacts are missed, often those who are the most vulnerable in society.

"The consequences of infectious disease outbreaks are significant both for public health at a macro and micro level, together with huge economic impact, again at both a macro and micro level. And this doesn't begin to consider the individual human loss and devastation caused to families."

He went on to say: "Dot2Dot has been designed primarily as a tool to help with manual contact tracing for TB, whereas a lot of the COVID 19 discussion is about population-level tracing.

"Having said that, we're keen to help if the app can be successfully deployed in the context of the current COVID-19 epidemic."

To find out more visit: https://dot2dot.app