Co-location Epidemic Tracking on London Public Transports Using Low Power Mobile Magnetometer

Abstract

The public transports provide an ideal means to enable contagious diseases transmission. This paper introduces a novel idea to detect co-location of people in such environment using just the ubiquitous geomagnetic field sensor on the smart phone. Essentially, given that all passengers must share the same journey between at least two consecutive stations, we have a long window to match the user trajectory. Our idea was assessed over a painstakingly survey of over 150 kilometres of travelling distance, covering different parts of London, using the overground trains, the underground tubes and the buses.