Can mHealth Technology Help Mitigate the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

• Main Authors: Catherine P. Adans-Dester, Stacy Bamberg, Francesco P. Bertacchi, Brian Caulfield, Kara Chappie, Danilo Demarchi, M. Kelley Erb, Juan Estrada, Eric E. Fabara, Michael Freni, Karl E. Friedl, Roozbeh Ghaffari, Geoffrey Gill, Mark S. Greenberg, Reed W. Hoyt, Emil Jovanov, Christoph M. Kanzler, Dina Katabi, Meredith Kernan, Colleen Kigin, Sunghoon I. Lee, Steffen Leonhardt, Nigel H. Lovell, Jose Mantilla, Thomas H. McCoy, Nell Meosky Luo, Glenn A. Miller, John Moore, Derek O'Keeffe, Jeffrey Palmer, Federico Parisi, Shyamal Patel, Jack Po, Benito L. Pugliese, Thomas Quatieri, Tauhidur Rahman, Nathan Ramasarma, John A. Rogers, Guillermo U. Ruiz-Esparza, Stefano Sapienza, Gregory Schiurring, Lee Schwamm, Hadi Shafiee, Sara Kelly Silacci, Nathaniel M Sims, Tanya Talkar, William J. Tharion, James A. Toombs, Christopher Uschnig, Gloria P. Vergara-Diaz, Paul Wacnik, May D. Wang, James Welch, Lina Williamson, Ross Zafonte, Adrian Zai, Yuan-Ting Zhang, Guillermo J. Tearney, Rushdy Ahmad, David R. Walt, Paolo Bonato
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
• Series: IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology
• Subjects: COVID-19; digital contact tracing; electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO); mHealth technology; wearable sensors
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9162431/
• ISSN: 2644-1276

Goal: The aim of the study herein reported was to review mobile health (mHealth) technologies and explore their use to monitor and mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A Task Force was assembled by recruiting individuals with expertise in electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes (ePRO), wearable sensors, and digital contact tracing technologies. Its members collected and discussed available information and summarized it in a series of reports. Results: The Task Force identified technologies that could be deployed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and would likely be suitable for future pandemics. Criteria for their evaluation were agreed upon and applied to these systems. Conclusions: mHealth technologies are viable options to monitor COVID-19 patients and be used to predict symptom escalation for earlier intervention. These technologies could also be utilized to monitor individuals who are presumed non-infected and enable prediction of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, thus facilitating the prioritization of diagnostic testing.