In this document we propose the use of geofencing together with active location through mobile carriers to monitor the mobility patterns of those individuals whose movements have been restricted within a specific area by the proper legal authorities, for example people who have tested positive and, thus, can easily transmit the disease to other people.

1. Geofencing Applications
Global Pandemic Context
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2. www.genasys.com
Contents
1. Introduction
2. How does Geofencing work?
3. What is an active location
4. Use of geofencing in a pandemic
5. GenasysTM
NEWS geofencing solution

3. The global pandemic of COVID-19 has
severely affected our normal way of life.
Many countries are enforcing severe
mobility restrictions, social distancing and
even the confinement of their population to
reduce contagion rates and avoid the
collapse of their health systems. The
medium and long-term effects of these
measures are unknown, but technology can
play a key role in improving the situation
thus avoiding a longer period of economic
paralysis.
Geofencing is a technique that allows an
authority to define an arbitrary area either
on a map or using administrative area
codes (e.g. zip or postal codes) or area
names (e.g. county or region names) to
monitor events such as:
A person enters the area.
A person leaves the area.
A person is inside or outside the area.
1. Introduction
2. How does geofencing work?
In this document we propose the use of
geofencing together with active location
through mobile carriers to monitor the
mobility patterns of those individuals whose
movements have been restricted within a
specific area by the proper legal authorities,
for example people who have tested positive
and, thus, can easily transmit the disease to
other people.
This person can be one specific subject (e.g.
a person who has Covid19), a group of
specific subjects (e.g. group of people who
has Covid19) or unspecified subjects (e.g. a
person that gets too close to a person that
has Covid19).
Authorized user draws
an area on the map.
Someone gets inside or
outside the area, and
the authority is notified.
Authority explicitly checks
whether a person is inside
the area.

4. Active location is a service that most
mobile carriers offer, that enables the
explicit location of a mobile subscriber in
real-time (within a few seconds) or almost
real-time (within tens of seconds).
Active location is offered by the LCS
(Location Service) solution deployed by the
mobile carrier. LCS is a standard service
defined by 3GPP and other national
standard bodies. This service always
3. What is active location?
complies with national user privacy
regulations applicable in the country where
it is provided.
Each time that the carrier’s LCS system
receives a request to actively locate a target
subscriber, it checks that the requestor is
authorized to locate the target and then
starts a procedure to find the location of the
target.
LCS standards define multiple location
methods (Cell Id, AoA, OTDOA, GNSS, etc.).
Each method has a different level of
accuracy and each carrier decides which of
these methods to support according to the
location accuracy required by the regulator
in their country. It is important to note that
the accuracy of the geofences is the same
as that of the most accurate location
method available to find the user. I.e. if the
most accurate method is a GNSS solution,
then the geofences can be very precise
(with meters / yards resolution); while if the
most accurate method is Cell Id, then the
geofence precision is the size of the cell,
which can be hundreds of meters / yards or
even kilometers / miles.
LOCATION
STEPS
1. Authorized user requests the location
of a subscriber.
2. The system checks whether the
requestor is authorized to locate the
target.
3. The network pages the subscriber
and starts the location procedure.
4. The network calculates the
subscriber’s location (e.g.
triangulation) and responds to user with
location.

5. 4. Use of geofencing in a pandemic
Social distancing disconnects the
contagion chain and policies to enforce it
have been fundamental to combat the
spread of this global pandemic. But once a
person is affected, normal social distancing
is not enough; actual quarantine
confinement is recommended to guarantee
that this person does not pass the disease
on to other people. However, prolonged
home confinement has proven very
challenging to enforce on some individuals
and, therefore, there is a need to lawfully
monitor their movements and quickly find
out when confinement is broken.
Some countries have opted for quite
intrusive and costly methods to do this
monitoring, like installing cameras at the
entrance of their houses or even using
geo-location bracelets. However, in many
countries these sorts of measures are not
socially acceptable and would require a
long legal procedure to get authorization on
a per case basis. The combination of
geofencing and active location is a much
more convenient and significantly lower
cost solution to achieve the same goal in a
way that is less intrusive and has less legal
burden. The only thing needed is the
deployment of the Genasys NEWS
geofencing solution with connectors to all
the mobile carriers’ LBS systems which
cover the affected area. This can be done
in a matter of days and, once done, the
steps to monitor a quarantined person are
very straightforward:
New Register
Name:
Surname:
Phone No.:
Address:
Area:
1. Register the people to be
monitored into the system,
providing the mobile phone number
and address of the location where
these people are quarantined.
4. Genasys NEWS periodically
checks, using active location, the
current location of this person.
!
5. If the person “jumps out” the
geofence, NEWS executes the
actions defined in step 2.
6. Based on configuration, the
solution can start tracking this
person in order to know where he is
located at all times when he is
outside the geofence.
2. Define what actions to take if a
person leaves the safe area. For
example, send a notification to said
person, raise an alert on the
command and control center, etc.
3. Genasys NEWS automatically
creates a geofence around this
person following the configuration
set by the administrator.

6. The geofencing logic periodically pulls the
location of each monitored user from the
LCS system of the cellular carrier handling
this user. Genasys NEWS can be configured
to use any of the following policies to
control this polling:
It can be a fixed period. E.g. request
user position every 20 minutes.
It can be a fixed period when the user
is inside the geofence and a different
period when the user is outside. E.g.
request position every 20 minutes
when the user is inside and every 5
minutes when outside the geofence.
It can be tuned depending on the
number of users to monitor. This is
useful when the SLA contract with a
carrier limits the number of requests
per period. In this case, Genasys NEWS
can dynamically adapt the polling rate
per carrier based on number of
monitored users for each carrier.
The use case above can be adapted in
several ways to each customer’s exact
needs. This is achieved by customizing how
the system reacts to a monitored individual
exiting their geo-fence. When unauthorized
movements are detected an event is
generated and said event will trigger actions
based on customer customizations. For
example, NEWS can send a warning telling
the individual to return to their quarantine
area, or automatic alarms can be sent to
authorized staff via differing methods (mail,
SMS); these alarms can include information
to identify the person. Other actions
regarding the system’s mass notification
capabilities can also be triggered. Of
course, Genasys NEWS can also be
integrated into other systems to
automatically send alarms when people exit
their geofences. It also detects when
monitored individuals return to their
geofences to deactivate said alarms (after
creating a report).
Geofencing is part of our NEWS Alert
Management solution that can be deployed
standalone or as an integral part of a larger
Public Warning System (PWS) to offer a
wide range of geofencing functionalities in
combination with virtually any cellular
location solution. When combined with
active location, it can be rolled out in a
matter of days with connectors to the LCS
systems of all the cellular carriers that
cover the area of interest.
5. GenasysTM NEWS geofencing solution
Genasys NEWS
Alert Management
Geofencing
Command and
Control
Carrier 1
LCS
Carrier N
LCS
Authorities Domaint
Cellular Carriers Domaint
Frontend

7. We offer a range of deployment options,
from local rollout on baremetal servers, to
virtualized environments, to private or
public clouds using different orchestration
solutions.
Genasys geofencing also works with
passive location. Passive location is a
solution that monitors the position of all
users from the interactions that these
users have with the cellular network from
the normal usage of their phones. No
explicit request is made to the mobile
carriers’ LCS systems to locate a user. In
the current implementation, passive
location has cell level accuracy, and the
solution can only detect when a user moves
from one cell to another. The main
advantages of passive location are that it
does not use LCS and it can be deployed in
two ways:
Fully integrated inside the carrier: in this
case, the monitoring is continuous (no
polling period) and, therefore, it can
detect when a user jumps out of the
geofence almost in real-time (from a few
seconds to a few minutes in worse
case).
Offline: in this case, the mobility data is
imported periodically (e.g. every night)
into Genasys NEWS from the cellular
carriers, and geofencing logic runs
against this data to find out which
monitored users have moved out of
their confinement area during that day.
This information can be used, for
example, to decide whether this user
should be put into active monitoring
from there on.
AoA
GNSS
LCS
OTDOA
PWS
SLA
3GPP
Angle of Arrival
Global Navigation Satellite System
Location Services
Observed Time Difference Of Arrival
Public Warning System
Service Level Agreement
3rd Generation Partnership Project https://www.3gpp.org/
Genasys has a range of state-of-the-art solutions for public warning,
geofencing, passive location and geographic data analysis, and very long
trajectory developing geographic information systems (GIS) and
visualisation tools of layered geographical data. Our solutions team can
rapidly design and deploy the solution that you need anywhere in the
world.
www.genasys.com
sales_EU@genasys.com
6. Abbreviations