The COVID-19 pandemic vastly amplified the need for scalable technological solutions that can provide location-based analytics to trace people and their contacts in a privacy preserving manner. Several countries have adopted proximity-based technologies based on Bluetooth Low Energy, which, however, are hindered by deployment issues, data leakages, lack of reliability and limited analytics capabilities.

CONTACT-CM posits that 5G and beyond cellular networks can play a primary role in contact tracing. Solutions based on 5G and beyond
location-based analytics benefit from the pervasive deployment and increasing computing power of cellular networks, the many years of effort designing comprehensive cellular standards for localization and analytics, the ongoing integration of multiple technologies in the incoming releases, and the well-established best practices and prior experience of cellular operators to handle and protect large volumes of sensitive data. Leveraging these factors, CONTACT-CM will investigate all the core research areas related to localization, privacy and analytics to enable 5G and beyond-based contact tracing. The primary objective is to demonstrate with an experimental platform that 5G and beyond cellular networks can play a pivotal role for contact tracing during a pandemic. The team of CONTACT-CM has substantial international experience in the core topics of the proposal, guaranteeing a smooth start and successful execution of the project. The short-term impact of CONTACT-CM will be an experimental system for pervasive, accurate and privacy-preserving contact-tracing analytics that can become part of the current roll out of 5G and beyond networks and help counteract the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Action funded by the Agreement signed between the Regional Government of Madrid (Department of Education, Universities, Science and Spokesmanship) and IMDEA Networks Institute for the direct award of a grant of 2,454,000.00 euros to fund the undertaking of research actions concerning SARS-COV 2 and the COVID-19 disease, funded with REACT-UE resources from the European Regional Development Fund.