Google wants to detect contact with Covid-19 positives and watches

January 8, 2021 Bary Howards

Do you use eRouška? You should. If you still haven’t figured out its principle, then know that it helps effectively to detect possible contact with persons who are infected with coronavirus. Thanks to it, you can prevent yourself, have yourself tested or let your friends or other users of the application know if the disease occurs in you as well. Enough persuasion. The principle of detecting the so-called exposure to the risk of transmission in mobile phones is based on Bluetooth technology. When one user reports an infection in the app, a notification is displayed on other phones that have been nearby in the past. As it seems, soon this process could leave the boundaries of smartphones. Google is likely to launch a detection of Covid-19 infections using a smart watch running Wear OS soon.

eRouška – Part of Smart Quarantine

As early as August last year, there was talk in the Bluetooth community of companies and institutions that the BLE standard could be modified for this purpose. And that after its change and introduction will be able to pass on information about contact with the infected not only cell phones among themselves, but wearable electronics could also take care of that. It seems that everything you need is almost ready and Google will take over the first implementation. XDA Developers has been able to find in the beta version v20.50.14 of the new Google Play Services to find pieces of code that confirm this.

Watch as a liaison point

In addition to traces of this feature, a new announcement has also appeared in the package, which should appear in Wear OS. “Your phone will be this use the device to securely and anonymously collect and share data about other nearby devices. As a result, you may be alerted to contact with an infected person. The date, duration and intensity of the contact will be passed through the application, ”says the new accompanying warning. Detecting infected Covid-19s with a watch is a very good idea and it is no wonder that Google immediately started. The novelty will help for example in situations where the user does not have a telephone with him during contact, but just a watch. This applies, for example, to outdoor sports.