back to article Bluetooth SIG strives to make wearables work as COVID-19 contact-trackers

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the body that oversees the wireless standard, has started work on a specification to allow wearable devices to take on the role that smartphone contact-tracing apps currently play in COVID-19 contact-tracing and notification efforts. The group’s rationale is that wearables “can …

  1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Both totally made up products.

    Shame. I like the sound of the iCough.

    1. cookieMonster Silver badge

      Re: Both totally made up products.

      iCough, uCough, we all fall down...

      1. iron Silver badge

        Re: Both totally made up products.

        I know a song about that.

  2. Cuddles
    FAIL

    Not quite thought it through

    "better address population groups where smartphone usage remains low... The SIG envisions that wearables will be bonded with a smartphone"

    Good plan. We'll do contact tracing in populations that don't have smartphones by requiring them to use a smartphone.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Not quite thought it through

      The solutionist manifesto… Would be nice to see what André Breton or Picabia would have made of it all!

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Not quite thought it through

      If I squint at it, maybe they're hoping that children will have some other device which picks up contacts over BT, then that syncs with their parent's phone to do the tracing. Which would actually work perfectly if not for the fact that most Bluetooth devices never get software updates, most of them don't have the storage to keep logs of their own identifiers (which change somewhat frequently) let alone identifiers for every passing device, children probably don't have many such devices, and most devices you could hope to put this in wouldn't serve their primary purposes unless they were linked with the phone the users don't have. Unless they're planning to design a custom device intended only for this purpose, they have little chance of success. If they are planning to help create custom devices, they don't need to modify the specification to do it. So I have no clue what they want to do.

  3. NeilPost Silver badge

    Nintendo

    Perhaps they need to wheel Nintendo/Niantic in and adapt Pokemon Go. That seems to work really well.

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