Romanian researchers develop app to help reduce coronavirus spread

A team of Romanian researchers has developed an app meant to minimize the spread of the coronavirus, Adevarul reported.

Called CovTrack, the app allows users to keep track of those they have come in contact with, including those later confirmed with COVID-19.

The app, available for Android devices, monitors people in the vicinity made identifiable via Bluetooth connections to the user’s mobile phone and stores the identification data of these devices. Users access the database in which the unique identifiers of the mobile phones are registered (without having access to any personal data of these mobile phone users), to verify whether the persons with whom they came in contact have subsequently been confirmed with COVID-19. If they have identified a potential contact, they can refer to the relevant authorities.

The app was developed within the local company Romanian InSpace Engineering (RISE).

“We are a group of some 15 engineers. I had the idea, but the development was done at Romanian InSpace Engineering,” founder Costel Cherciu explained.

Twenty-six-year old Cherciu is a Ph.D. student in Electronics and Telecommunication at the Bucharest Polytechnic University. He works with RISE and the Space Sciences Institute of Bucharest, and has collaborated on projects of the European Space Agency (ESA), Adevarul reported.

The app has been functional since March 25. Cherciu says they notified the authorities about it but received no answer.