The Linux Foundation Is Making It Even Easier for Health Agencies to Use Apple’s COVID-19 Exposure Notification System

The battle against COVID-19 is far from over, and while some countries around the world have found themselves able to safely — and slowly — start easing lockdown restrictions, others have been facing second waves or even unfinished first waves, often as a result of moving too soon or not having the necessary health infrastructure in place to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

As countries like South Korea and Singapore discovered early on, “contact tracing” has become an important part of controlling the pandemic, and most health authorities around the world have been doing it in some form or another. Usually, this is just done the old-fashioned way, which involves interviewing those who are diagnosed with COVID-19 to find out who they may have been in contact with, and then attempting to notify those individuals of their possible exposure to the virus so they can come in and get tested.

Due to the complexities of adopting this on a wider scale, however, several government health agencies began to adopt digital methods of contact tracing. Singapore was among the first, with its TraceTogether app, which users could install on their iPhone or Android smartphone, where it would use Bluetooth to keep track of other smartphones that it came into close contact with.

The downside to apps like TraceTogether, however, is that not only did everybody need to download and install the app, but it also needed to be left running in the foreground to be truly effective, impacting battery life in the process. To address these kinds of problems, Apple and Google forged a landmark partnership to develop a way to do this kind of tracing that would effectively work in the background while also promising to protect users’ privacy.

Apple and Google did this by focusing on a decentralized approach, where the list of devices that you came into contact with would be stored only on your actual iPhone or Android smartphone, and would be done so in a way that would not give up any personally identifying information — only randomized Bluetooth IDs. In the event a patient received a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, the system could use the randomized Bluetooth IDs stored on that person’s iPhone to notify other users who may have been exposed to the virus.

Unfortunately, not everybody liked Apple and Google’s decentralized approach, and countries like France actually got a bit hostile over the fact that Apple wasn’t doing anything to help them do contact tracing their own way — which generally meant collecting a centralized database to track the movements of their citizens. By contrast, Apple and Google’s system doesn’t use location services at all, and apps that plug into it are even forbidden from including their own location tracking features — in fact that’s one of a whole list of extra rules that governments and health agencies have to agree to before they’re allowed to use the Apple-Google API.

In fact, Apple went so far as to eschew the name “contact tracing” for its API to avoid the negative privacy connotations associated with the term, choosing instead to call it an “Exposure Notification System,” since of course, that is its real purpose.

This has led to a mishmash of contact tracing apps around the world, with some using the Apple-Google API and others using their own systems, with varying levels of success. Not surprisingly, however, it’s those that use the Apple-Google API that have been the most popular with end users, even though only a handful of countries have yet embraced the Apple-Google API.

Making It Easier to Get on Board

Leaving aside political issues in countries like France and the U.K., one other reason for this relatively slow uptake may simply be the complexity of getting exposure notification apps up and running. Many government health agencies don’t have the technical expertise to build these apps, and may even have a hard time finding developers with the necessary chops to pull it off, especially if they’re restricted to looking only within their own borders.

Now, however, The Linux Foundation is stepping up to help fill this gap in capabilities by partnering with several big players — and two existing COVID-19 apps that use the Apple-Google API — to give health authorities around the world a big head start in putting together their own apps.

Despite its obvious association with the Linux operating system, the Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization with the goal of promoting open source software technologies around the world in general — technologies for which Linux is of course the main poster child. Now it has announced the new Linux Foundation Public Health initiative (LFPH) with seven Premier members to help public health authorities (PHAs) worldwide not only in the fight against COVID-19, but to also empower them to deal with future pandemics.

The new initiative involves some heavy players, including Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent, and VMware, plus the exposure notification apps COVID Shield and COVID Green. The initial focus of LFPH will be to empower applications to use the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) system, but it plans to expand beyond that “to support all aspects of PHA’s testing, tracing, and isolation activities.”

The Key Apps

The first of the two apps involved, COVID Shield, was developed by a volunteer team at Ottawa-based e-commerce firm Shopify in cooperation with the Canadian government and the Province of Ontario, and is already in the process of being rolled out in Canada; it was supposed to arrive for residents of Ontario on July 2, but has been pushed back to July 24, due to delays in getting it approved by the Canadian federal government, according to iPhone in Canada.

The second app, COVID Green, was developed by a team at NearForm, one of the Foundation’s Premier members, on behalf of the Irish Government. It was deployed by Ireland’s Health Services Executive two weeks ago, and has already been adopted by over 30 percent of the country’s adults.

The source code for both apps is being made available for public health agencies and their technology partners to use as templates for building their own exposure notification apps, and the Linux Foundation adds that other organizations are also expected to contribute the source code for their apps to LFPH in the coming weeks. In every case, however, the apps will be using the exposure notification system that was jointly developed by Apple and Google, which should hopefully help to spur even wider adoption of this technology.

At this point, while a few U.S. states have been working on their own apps, there has yet to be an app in the U.S. that uses the Apple and Google exposure notification API. In fact, although the Canadian province of Alberta was actually the first agency in North America to release a contact tracing app of any kind, Canada’s COVID Shield will be the first to use the Apple-Google system.