INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE-AIDED CONTACT TRACING FRAMEWORK: TOWARDS REAL-TIME MODEL-DRIVEN PREDICTION OF COVID-19 CASES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

As many countries around the world are trying to live with the deadly coronavirus by adhering to the safety measures put in place by their government as regulated by World Health Organization (WHO), it becomes very vital to continuously trace patients with COVID-19 symptoms for isolation, quarantine and treatment. In this work, an intelligent software-aided contact tracing for real-time model-driven prediction of COVID-19 cases is proposed utilizing COVID-19 dataset from kaggle.com. The dataset is preprocessed using One-Hot encoding and Principal Component Analysis. Isolation Forest algorithm is used to train and predict COVID-19 cases. The performance of the model is evaluated using Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1-Score. The intelligent software-aided contact tracing framework has four layers: symptoms, modeling/prediction, cloud storage/contact routing and contact tracers. The contact tracing system is an android application that receives symptom values, predict it and automatically send the prediction result together with user’s contact and location details to the closest contact tracer via the Firebase real-time database. The closest contact tracer is determined by employing a dynamic routing algorithm (contact routing algorithm) that uses Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol to compute the distance between two geographic locations (user and contact tracer) and chooses a contact tracer with shortest distance to the patient utilizing a unicast routing technique (routing a patient to a contact tracer in a one-to-one relationship). The predictive model along with the android application for software-aided contact tracing is implemented using the python, and Java programming language on Pycharm and Android Studio IDE respectively. This Framework is capable of predicting COVID-19 patients, notifying contact tracers of positive cases for proper follow-up which can subsequently curtail the spread of the virus.