Wearable Sensors for COVID-19: A Call to Action to Harness Our Digital Infrastructure for Remote Patient Monitoring and Virtual Assessments

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need to harness and leverage our digital infrastructure for remote patient monitoring. As current viral tests and vaccines are slow to emerge, we see a need for more robust disease detection and monitoring of individual and population health, which could be aided by wearable sensors. While the utility of this technology has been used to correlate physiological metrics to daily living and human performance, the translation of such technology toward predicting the incidence of COVID-19 remains a necessity. When used in conjunction with predictive platforms, users of wearable devices could be alerted when changes in their metrics match those associated with COVID-19. Anonymous data localized to regions such as neighborhoods or zip codes could provide public health officials and researchers a valuable tool to track and mitigate the spread of the virus, particularly during a second wave. Identifiable data, for example remote monitoring of cohorts (family, businesses, and facilities) associated with individuals diagnosed with COVID-19, can provide valuable data such as acceleration of transmission and symptom onset. This manuscript describes clinically relevant physiological metrics which can be measured from commercial devices today and highlights their role in tracking the health, stability, and recovery of COVID-19+ individuals and front-line workers. Our goal disseminating from this paper is to initiate a call to action among front-line workers and engineers toward developing digital health platforms for monitoring and managing this pandemic.

The Importance of Respiratory Rate Monitoring: From Healthcare to Sport and Exercise

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly increased awareness of the importance of effective respiratory monitoring [5,101], which is an unprecedented opportunity to solve long-standing issues related to f R monitoring in the context of pneumonia. Here, we focus on the measurement techniques suitable for pneumonia monitoring in children, a condition presenting some peculiar challenges, including high resting f R values (especially in newborn babies) and the possible presence of artifacts in the respiratory signal due to movement and crying.…”

Smart textiles and wearable technologies – opportunities offered in the fight against pandemics in relation to current COVID-19 state

“…Many textile-based wearable systems are being developed for getting recordings of cardiorespiratory and motion signals by combing textile sensors for ECG and breathing frequency detection with portable electronic and signal preprocessing technologies [185]. Wearable technology during Covid-19 -combine the trackers and apps that can measure vital signs related to developing symptoms [186], but also monitoring with the assessments [187]. The availability of a large number of accurate data collected from breathing monitoring could contribute to improving the development of predictive models for the risk of hospital admission, and the development of diagnostic and prognostic models.…”

Perspective on the increasing role of optical wearables and remote patient monitoring in the COVID-19 era and beyond

“…They also reported an online, real-time detection algorithm that could identify 67% of cases at or before symptoms occurred. I refer readers to the recent review by Seshadri et al 23 for an in depth description of wearable technologies for COVID-19.…”