Contact tracing is of paramount importance when it comes to preventing the
spreading of infectious diseases. Contact tracing is usually performed manually
by authorized personnel. Manual contact tracing is an inefficient, error-prone,
time-consuming process of limited utility to the population at large as those
in close contact with infected individuals are informed hours, if not days,
later. This paper introduces an alternative way to manual contact tracing. The
proposed Smart Contact Tracing (SCT) system utilizes the smartphone's Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE) signals and machine learning classifier to accurately and
quickly determined the contact profile. SCT's contribution is two-fold: a)
classification of the user's contact as high/low-risk using precise proximity
sensing, and b) user anonymity using a privacy-preserving communications
protocol. SCT leverages BLE's non-connectable advertising feature to broadcast
a signature packet when the user is in the public space. Both broadcasted and
observed signatures are stored in the user's smartphone and they are only
uploaded to a secure signature database when a user is confirmed by public
health authorities to be infected. Using received signal strength (RSS) each
smartphone estimates its distance from other user's phones and issues real-time
alerts when social distancing rules are violated. The paper includes extensive
experimentation utilizing real-life smartphone positions and a comparative
evaluation of five machine learning classifiers. Reported results indicate that
a decision tree classifier outperforms other states of the art classification
methods in terms of accuracy. Lastly, to facilitate research in this area, and
to contribute to the timely development of advanced solutions the entire data
set of six experiments with about 123,000 data points is made publicly
available.