Smartphone App
Our study used data from NOVID, an app for Android and iOS developed during the COVID-19 pandemic28,29. The app supported multiple different strategies for mitigating disease spread, one of which was exposure notification. A smartphone with the app installed broadcasts Bluetooth signals to identify potential contacts based on other nearby users. The app estimates the duration of interactions based on the time of the first and last exchanged signals, and the distance between contacts based on the strength of the Bluetooth interactions. The app further classifies contacts as either strong or weak: strong contacts occur between smartphones that are ≤ 10.1 meters apart for ≥ 15 minutes, while weak contacts consist of all other interactions.19,30 To address limitations in the accuracy of Bluetooth-based distance measurements between smartphones23,31, the app augments Bluetooth-based distance estimates with inaudible, ultrasonic microphone “squeaks.”29 At the time of the analyzed deployment, ultrasonic “squeak” distance measurements were only operational between Android phones. The app maintains user privacy by assigning each user a random identifier at the time of app installation. No location data or personal identifiers are collected, but daily strong and weak contacts between users are collected and used to construct a contact network of cumulative contacts over the preceding two weeks.
The app allows users to report to the app when they have tested positive for COVID-19. When this happens, the app delivers notifications of prior exposure to other users who were connected up to 2 contact network “hops” away in the preceding two weeks. The exposure notifications are delivered via a smartphone push notification, i.e., a pop-up alert that typically appears on a mobile phone’s lock screen and notifications tab such that it is visible even if the application is not open.
Deployment in a university community
The present study focuses on the app’s users at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a large public research university located in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Georgia Tech resumed in-person lectures in the Fall semester of 2020, making it one of the first major US universities to resume large gatherings after the onset of COVID-1932. As part of the university’s COVID-19 mitigation measures, students and staff were encouraged to use the app’s notification features in order to facilitate timely testing and self-isolation after a potential exposure32,33. Although the app also introduced another different disease mitigation strategy (a personalized “COVID-19 radar” showing how many network “hops” the user was from positive cases in their contact network29), that feature was not emphasized in the university’s communications, and so the present study focuses on testing digital exposure notification. To our knowledge, there was no other contact tracing app in wide use among this population; the GAEN contact tracing app was not permitted to operate in the state of Georgia at this time. Students began returning to campus in early January of 2021 before classroom instruction began on January 14. Campus health services recommended that returning students and staff test within 3–5 days of arriving on campus and to self-isolate for 10 days before commencing with in-person classes and other group activities. Students and staff who tested positive were asked to self-isolate for 10 days34. Free-of-cost testing was available during this time at Georgia Tech’s campus health services, which had capacity to test all campus visitors biweekly35.
Although the app became available for download in mid-2020, the present analysis focuses on data collected beginning January 1, 2021, when the app became fully functional on both Android and iOS smartphones and campus health services began verification of positive cases reported to the app. The data collection period ended on March 15, 2021 to focus the present study on a time when COVID-19 vaccines where not yet widely available and health authorities strongly recommended participation in contact tracing, in addition to other non-pharmaceutical interventions such as testing, mask-wearing, and social distancing.
Analysis of app data
Definition of app users at Georgia Tech
Because the app does not collect location information, users in the Georgia Tech community were identified based on the set of users who input Georgia Tech’s community code upon installation as well as their nearest neighbors in the contact network29. This code was disseminated as part of an informational campaign on campus to encourage the use of the app. App users were considered to be active from the time the app was installed on a smartphone until the last time that device transmitted an automated daily message indicating the app remained installed. For the present analysis we assumed each user ID represented a unique individual, although we note that if a user were to uninstall and re-install the app on the same device, they would be issued a new user ID and recorded as two separate users.
Inclusion criteria for analysis
We identified three groups of active app users for analysis: “reported cases,” all users who reported a positive test result to the app; “notified users,” all users who received a digital exposure notification from because they were near to at least one reported case in the contact network; and the “control group,” all remaining users who never reported a case or received an exposure notification. For each of the reporting users and notified users, we excluded users who had fewer than three days active in the contact network in the seven days prior to the report or notification in order to focus on consistent app users with measurable baseline social interactions. We also excluded users who deleted the app within 7 days or never became active again after 7 days following the time of the report or notification.
Calculating contact time
We used Bluetooth signal data to calculate interaction duration as the time from the first signal exchange to the last signal exchange between a given pair of devices. Interactions were classified into strong and weak links using the same criteria as those used by the app itself (see Appendix 1 for further details).
Measuring changes in social interactions
For each reported case and notified user, we calculated daily contact time beginning 7 days prior to the time of the event through 7 days after the time of the event. A 7-day pre- and post-event window was chosen to ensure each day of the week was equally represented in the analysis for all users. We defined the time of the event as Day 0 and rescaled the total cumulative contact time from Day − 7 to Day 0 to be 0.5, such that a user with constant daily total contact time would have a cumulative rescaled time of 1 between Days − 7 and + 7. We performed a difference-in-differences analysis to calculate whether there was a statistically significant change to a user’s rescaled contact time after reporting a case or receiving an exposure notification from the app.
In addition, we quantified each reported case and each notified user’s behavioral change by calculating the difference in total contact time for the 7-day period after the event minus the total contact time for the 7-day period before the event. From this we obtained distributions of behavioral change for total contact time, contact time from weak interactions only, and contact time from strong interactions only, and used a paired t-test to compare the behavioral change distributions from reported cases and notified users against their respective control groups.
Controlling for secular trends in social interactions
The difference-in-differences analysis may be impacted by secular trends or fluctuations in social interaction time. To control for these, we matched each user who experienced an event – reporting a case or receiving a notification – with a control group of users36 who met the following criteria: (1) had an active app installation during the same window of time as the matched user, i.e., from Day − 7 to Day + 7, (2) had comparable contact with other app users from Day − 7 to Day 0, defined as ± 25% of the reporting user’s 7-day cumulative contact time before the time of the report, (3) did not report being a case between Day − 7 and + 7, (4) were not direct contacts of a case between Day − 7 and + 7, and (5) did not receive a notification of exposure between Days − 7 and + 7.
Power analysis
We constructed a synthetic dataset by artificially reducing the total weak interaction time by for users who received an exposure notification in the 7 days following. We varied the magnitude of the reduction to test the limit of detection for the methodology applied to our study cohort.
Sensitivity analyses
We assessed the sensitivity of the results to the window of time used for analysis relative to the day of case report or exposure notification. Alternative time windows used in sensitivity analyses were ± 1-day, ± 3-days, and ± 5-days. We further assessed the sensitivity of the results to the strength of interactions considered. The analysis was repeated as described but using data for only strong interactions, and again for only weak interactions.