Working under Pandemic Conditions: Contact Tracing Meets Technology

Covid-19 has dramatically transformed our working practices with a big change to a teleworking model for many people. There are however many essential activities requiring personnel on site. In order to minimise the risks for its personnel CERN decided to take every measure possible, including internal contact tracing by the CERN medical service. This initially involved manual procedures which relied on people’s ability to remember past encounters. To improve this situation and minimise the number of employees who would need to be quarantined, CERN approved the design of a specific device: the Proximeter. The project goal was to design a wearable device, built in a partnership* with industry fulfilling the contact tracing needs of the medical service. The proximeter records other devices in close proximity and reports the encounters to a cloud-based system. The service came into operation early 2021 and 8000 devices were distributed to personnel working on the CERN site. This publication reports on the service offered, emphasising on the overall workflow of the project under exceptional conditions and the implications data privacy imposed on the design of the software application.