Geofencing For Automated Event Detection And Case Management

Use of Geofencing on the Linkt platform constitutes an innovative solution for detecting adverse events and outcomes for large-scale, long-duration clinical trials and research. Geofencing uses location information securely held within a participant’s own device (e.g., mobile phone) to allow the device to detect whether a participant has crossed a virtual perimeter around a geographic landmark (e.g., hospital, clinic). Standard approaches to capturing adverse events, like phone banks and electronic medical record (EMR) searches, suffer from poor scalability, susceptibility to missed data, and delayed reporting; issues addressed by automated systems such as geofencing. We examined geofencing data for two independent sub-studies using the Linkt geofencing feature – an observational community-based study of COVID-19 (N=360) and a vaccine clinical trial by a major pharmaceutical company (N=40). This preliminary report summarizes the real-world performance of geofencing for automatic detection of geofence crossings.