Adaptive Distance Sensing in Contact Tracing Applications Through Indoor/Outdoor Detection

Physical distancing is one of the most effective measures for limiting the spreading of the COVID-19 disease. Smartphones, being carried by their owners most of the time, are particularly appealing for increasing the awareness of people about their closeness to other individuals. Sensing the distance using communications technologies like Bluetooth is known to be affected by the surrounding environment. In this paper, we study the benefits that can be achieved by automatically recognizing if the user is indoor or outdoor and then defining a customized threshold for improving the accuracy of social distancing applications. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.