Perspective: Wearable Internet of Medical Things for Remote Tracking of Symptoms, Prediction of Health Anomalies, Implementation of Preventative Measures, and Control of Virus Spread During the Era of COVID-19

Sarmad Mehrdad; Yao Wang; S Farokh Atashzar

doi:10.3389/frobt.2021.610653

Perspective: Wearable Internet of Medical Things for Remote Tracking of Symptoms, Prediction of Health Anomalies, Implementation of Preventative Measures, and Control of Virus Spread During the Era of COVID-19

Front Robot AI. 2021 Apr 14:8:610653. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2021.610653. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Sarmad Mehrdad¹, Yao Wang^{1

2}, S Farokh Atashzar^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University, New York, NY, United States.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, New York University, New York, NY, United States.
³ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, New York University, New York, NY, United States.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highly impacted the communities globally by reprioritizing the means through which various societal sectors operate. Among these sectors, healthcare providers and medical workers have been impacted prominently due to the massive increase in demand for medical services under unprecedented circumstances. Hence, any tool that can help the compliance with social guidelines for COVID-19 spread prevention will have a positive impact on managing and controlling the virus outbreak and reducing the excessive burden on the healthcare system. This perspective article disseminates the perspectives of the authors regarding the use of novel biosensors and intelligent algorithms embodied in wearable IoMT frameworks for tackling this issue. We discuss how with the use of smart IoMT wearables certain biomarkers can be tracked for detection of COVID-19 in exposed individuals. We enumerate several machine learning algorithms which can be used to process a wide range of collected biomarkers for detecting (a) multiple symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection and (b) the dynamical likelihood of contracting the virus through interpersonal interaction. Eventually, we enunciate how a systematic use of smart wearable IoMT devices in various social sectors can intelligently help controlling the spread of COVID-19 in communities as they enter the reopening phase. We explain how this framework can benefit individuals and their medical correspondents by introducing Systems for Symptom Decoding (SSD), and how the use of this technology can be generalized on a societal level for the control of spread by introducing Systems for Spread Tracing (SST).

Keywords: AI for health; COVID-19; IoMT; smart connected health; smart wearables; spread control; symptom tracking; telemedicine.