King's College London

The competition Policy Idol, run by the Policy Institute at King’s, is an annual competition open to students to pitch their policy ideas to a panel of judges.

The top pitches go through to the final hosted by BBC News Home Editor, Mark Easton, and are judged by Bobby Duffy, Director, the Policy Institute; Lord Jo Johnson, Former Universities Minister; Professor Anand Menon, Director, UK in a Changing Europe; and Baroness Louise Casey, independent advisor for social policy and Chair of the Institute of Global Homelessness.

The students’ policy, Bands for Britain is focused on a novel form of contact tracing, to reduce the impacts of future viruses and diseases on society, the economy and health.

Bands for Britain is accurate, private and autonomous. Bands would be distributed and worn by the population and would use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRWAN) technology to precisely and effectively trace contacts made.

The students say data is anonymous and cannot be connected to the person wearing the band.

This data can then be sent and saved on regional servers for short periods of time.

In the event of a positive case, contacts can be automatically identified and automatically notified via a flashing light on their band to isolate and test.

The system requires minimal user interaction. Users simply wear the bands and if one person comes into close contact with another the two ‘band numbers’ associated with these bands, date and time can be sent to a server.

If at risk of high exposure, users will be notified.