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

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc globally and still persists even after a year of its initial outbreak. Several reasons can be considered: people are in close contact with each other, i.e., at a short range (1 m), and the healthcare system is not sufficiently developed or does not have enough facilities to manage and fight the pandemic, even in developed countries such as the USA and the U.K. and countries in Europe. There is a great need in healthcare for remote monitoring of COVID-19 symptoms. In the past year, a number of IoT-based devices and wearables have been introduced by researchers, providing good results in terms of high accuracy in diagnosing patients in the prodromal phase and in monitoring the symptoms of patients, i.e., respiratory rate, heart rate, temperature, etc. In this systematic review, we analyzed these wearables and their need in the healthcare system. The research was conducted using three databases: IEEE Xplore^®, Web of Science^®, and PubMed Central^®, between December 2019 and June 2021. This article was based on the PRISMA guidelines. Initially, 1100 articles were identified while searching the scientific literature regarding this topic. After screening, ultimately, 70 articles were fully evaluated and included in this review. These articles were divided into two categories. The first one belongs to the on-body sensors (wearables), their types and positions, and the use of AI technology with ehealth wearables in different scenarios from screening to contact tracing. In the second category, we discuss the problems and solutions with respect to utilizing these wearables globally. This systematic review provides an extensive overview of wearable systems for the remote management and automated assessment of COVID-19, taking into account the reliability and acceptability of the implemented technologies.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; physiological monitoring; real-time monitoring; sensors; wearable devices.

Figure 1

PRISMA-based flow diagram used for articles’ systematic selection.

Figure 2

Wearables based on on-body location [57].

Figure 3

The home hospitalization platform proposed by [75] based on fog computing, which is a highly suitable and efficient system in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 4

Potential applications of wearables in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 5

Symptoms of COVID-19.