## 2 Innovation, Effectuation, and COVID-19 Contact Tracing
They do not know each other, but they remain close to each other when talking. During this time, while they remain close (a few feet apart), their phones will exchange non-identifiable beacons. Afterward, if [PERSON] is COVID-19 positive, he will communicate his positive status to the corresponding public health authority and with his consent, his phone will upload the last 14 days of beacons to a server. Meanwhile, [PERSON]'s phone periodically receives the beacons of positive cases from the server, looking for a match with the beacons stored in her phone (e.g., [PERSON]'s beacons). Because [PERSON] has advised of his positive status, [PERSON]'s phone will find a match and she will receive a notification. Several countries have adopted the Apple and Google proposed methodology and deployed their own national notification applications. An example of such an app is Radar Covid, launched in Spain in August 2020 (Figure 1b) with European-wide interoperability amongst other apps using the same technological approach and sharing the same European accepted privacy standards. Nevertheless, a succession of failed communication efforts, an increasing mistrust of the population about data privacy, and a non-intuitive code certification process to make the app effective eventually undermined its use. By March 2021, Radar Covid hit bottom in its adoption after topping seven million downloads, as seen in Table 1, covering less than 20% of the population, with an average ratio of COVID-19 cases effectively detected through the app averaging 1.14% by December 2021 (see Table 1). By January 2022, the Spanish government stopped the active tracing of close contacts of COVID-19 infected individuals. While still keeping Radar Covid functional, the app stopped being effectively used after 14 months of its implementation [18]. Figure 1: (**a**) Apple and Google COVID-19 exposure notification system framework (credit: Google/ Apple Exposure Notification FAQ, p. 4, [[https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/](https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/)]([https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/](https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/)) (accessed on 26 April 2022)); (**b**) Radar Covid public campaign (Spain’s official Covid contact-tracing app) (Credit: [19]). Radar Covid can be seen as a case in point of how IoT services (and the IoT market) came into existence in the context of uncertainty and a pre-existing market (an explicit demand to detect and report Covid infected individuals). Nevertheless, despite significant government efforts and clear benefits at the individual and collective levels, the failure in its adoption can open a broader discussion about the more extensive IoT adoption by industries and individuals. In our view, the illustrative case of a failure in the adoption of Radar Covid and other contact tracing apps worldwide [23; 24; 25] should not prevent further innovation in creating effective early warning systems to prevent future pandemics. In previous research projects, the authors of this work investigated intelligent transportation systems, particularly on how to reduce pollution and improve key traffic performance indicators (e.g., travel time, congestion, etc.) by using smart algorithms. Some of our results demonstrated the importance of considering the behavior of pedestrians when making traffic control decisions [26; 27]. Applying effectuation and embracing the effectual approach, the authors decided to use their acquired know-how in pedestrians and vehicular management to create an EWS tool able to monitor people's behavior in indoor or outdoor areas during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new early warning system, as described in Section 4, was not only designed, but also implemented, deployed, and tested in a real testbed using the authors' experience with early tested innovations using sensors and IoT systems in vehicular traffic monitoring and control.