Can Radar Remote Life Sensing Technology Help Combat COVID-19?

Abstract

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, is now a global pandemic disease. This outbreak has affected every aspect of life including work, leisure, and interaction with technology. Governments around the world have issued orders for travel bans, social distancing, and lockdown to control the spread of the virus and prevent strain on hospitals. This paper explores potential applications for radar-based non-contact remote respiration sensing technology that may help to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and outlines potential advantages that may also help to reduce the spread of the virus. Applications arising from recent developments in the state of the art for transceiver and signal processing technologies will be discussed along associated technical implications. These applications include remote breathing rate monitoring, continuous identity authentication, occupancy detection, and hand gesture recognition. This paper also highlights future research directions that must be explored further to bring this innovative non-contact sensor technology into real-world implementation.

A Real-Time Respiration Monitoring and Classification System Using a Depth Camera and Radars

“…We also intend to implement the respiratory pattern classification to detect respiration patterns related to COVID-19. Radars are very useful for COVID-19 because they are contactless, can be used to estimate distance among people which is important for COVID-19 distancing protocols and to estimate RR and detect RP (Islam et al, 2021). According to Wang et al (2020a), tachypnea is one of the symptoms of COVID-19 that can be detected with our system.…”

“…The system continuously and unobtrusively monitors people when they are in the range of sensors. The main applications of our system include monitoring respiration patterns of patients with congestive heart failure (Tobushi et al, 2019 ), detecting drug overdose (Bachmutsky et al, 2020 ), monitoring inmates (Graichen et al, 2012 ), monitoring elders in their living environments (home, retirement home) and assisting in monitoring COVID-19 (Islam et al, 2021 ). However, this work is a proof of concept and has not yet been used in these applications.…”

Evaluating the COVID-19 Identification ResNet (CIdeR) on the INTERSPEECH COVID-19 From Audio Challenges

“…The Cycle Threshold (CT) of the PCR test should also be recorded, CT correlates with viral load (26) and therefore would enable researchers to determine the model's classification performance to the disease at varying viral loads. This relationship is critical in assessing the usefulness of any model in the context of a mass testing scheme, since the ideal model would detect a viral load lower than the level that confers infectiousness 6 . Finally, studies similar to Bartl-Pokorny et al (8), directly comparing acoustic features of COVID-19-positive and COVID-19-negative participants should be conducted on all publicly available datasets.…”

“…Sensitivities of 58 % have been reported for self-administered LFTs ( 4 ), unacceptably low when used to detect active virus, a context where high sensitivity is essential to prevent the reintegration into society of falsely reassured infected test recipients ( 5 ). In addition to mass testing, radar remote life sensing technology offers non-contact applications to combat COVID-19 including heart rate tracking, identity authentication, indoor monitoring and gesture recognition ( 6 ).…”

A “Not So Quiet” Revolution: Systemic Benefits and Challenges of Telehealth in the Context of COVID-19 in Quebec (Canada)

“…For example, the Reacts platform was only available on Google Chrome; the Zoom platform had problems with previous versions of Internet Explorer; and the Microsoft Teams platform had problems working on some web browsers (e.g., to support Office 365) and did not allow the patient to access the meeting through a telephone bridge (65)(66)(67)(68). Furthermore, interoperability, cybersecurity, and liability issues (e.g., confidentiality, privacy) have made it difficult to integrate other technologies, especially those based on remote sensing (e.g., doppler radar, non-contact screening, and monitoring applications), in the care and monitoring of patients, despite the role they could have played in the pandemic (69)(70)(71). These issues have made it difficult to effectively use telehealth, especially in creating "digital online care pathways that link rapid and widespread testing with digital symptom checkers, contact tracing, epidemiological intelligence and long-term clinical follow up" (72).…”