Wearable Sensing and Telehealth Technology with Potential Application in Corona Virus Pandemic

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a pandemic with serious clinical manifestations, including death. A pandemic at a large-scale like COVID-19 places extraordinary demands on the world’s health systems, dramatically devastates vulnerable populations, and critically threatens the global communities in an unprecedented way. While tremendous efforts at the frontline are placed on detecting the virus, providing treatments, and developing vaccines, it is also critically important to examine the technologies and systems for tackling disease emergence, arresting its spread, and especially the strategy for disease prevention. This article reviews enabling technologies and systems with various application scenarios for handling the COVID-19 crisis. The paper will focus specifically on 1) wearable devices suitable for monitoring the populations at risk and those in quarantine, both for evaluating the health status of caregivers and management personnel and for facilitating triage processes for admission to hospitals; 2) unobtrusive sensing systems for detecting the disease and for monitoring patients with relatively mild symptoms whose clinical situation could suddenly worsen in improvised hospitals, and 3) telehealth technologies for the remote monitoring and diagnosis of COVID-19 and related diseases. Finally, further challenges and opportunities for future directions of development are highlighted.