Wearables to Fight COVID-19: From Symptom Tracking to Contact Tracing

Abstract

& THE NEW CORONAVIRUS pandemic has promoted the new development of mobile and wearable computing in unprecedented ways. We discuss how on-body devices can help to fight the pandemic and may stay as a toolset to effectively deal with infectious diseases in the future. WHY WEARABLES?Researchers and health policy managers turned to smartphones and on-body devices mostly for their ubiquity, i.e., to offer health and safety-related information to a large share of the population or gather patient responses. Yet, smartphones and wearables enable fast data and information flow, which is particularly relevant for the rapid infectious character of SARS-CoV-2. We observe that continuous sensor and behavior data of smartphones and on-body devices are important as virus testing is associated with effort, cost, and provides only one-time information, and global immunization is still far away.We focus here on already existing and newly created wearable devices and smartphone apps for everyday use, but we exclude clinical and laboratory measurement systems, e.g., for heart and respiratory assessment. For researchers and public health authorities, symptom screening and tracking based on continuous sensor data from wearables and smartphones can

The Rise of Wearable Devices during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

“…This area needs more attention for a proper implementation. While developing wearable devices for contact tracing applications, the researchers must follow data privacy regulations [ 102 ]. The accuracy of these tools for contact tracing and maintaining social distancing will subsequently reduce the burden [ 103 , 104 ] on governments and healthcare systems.…”

Using Privacy Respecting Sound Analysis to Improve Bluetooth Based Proximity Detection for COVID-19 Exposure Tracing and Social Distancing

“…However, this is an extra burden for people when the social distancing rule needs to be applied, especially for hospital workers who need to focus on their duties. In these cases it is helpful to support social distancing and contract tracing by technically aided approaches [7]. There are a series of sensing modalities with distance or proximity monitoring as a basic functionality, such as ultrasound [8][9][10], Ultra Wide Band (UWB) [11][12][13], magnetic field [14,15], electric field [16], visual-based sensing [17] etc.…”

Development of Wearable System to Help Preventing the Spread of Covid-19 in Public Indoor Area

“…In [10], authors suggest several approaches and principles in wearables systems and sensor recommendation used for symptom tracking and contact tracing. Mostly the suggestion is still in the initiative scale and there is no further development in specific one system to help the social and physical measures enforcement.…”

“…Thus, an additional system to support the health protocol enforcement is needed. A wearable system is a suitable system that can be implemented since it enables fast data and information flow, particularly relevant for the rapid infectious character of COVID-19 virus [10].…”