Toward Mitigating Spreading of Coronavirus via Mobile Devices

摘要

Recently, the impact of coronavirus has been witnessed by almost every country around the world. To mitigate spreading of coronavirus, a fundamental strategy would be reducing chance of healthy people from being exposed to it. Having observed the fact that most viruses come from coughing/sneezing/runny noses of infected people, in this work we propose to detect such symptom events via mobile devices (smartphones, smart watches, and other IoT devices) possessed by most people in the modern world and to instantly broadcast locations where the symptoms have been observed to other people. This would be able to significantly reduce the risk that healthy people get exposed to the virus. Mobile devices today are usually equipped with various sensors including microphone, accelerometer, and GPS, as well as network connection (4G, LTE, Wi-Fi), which makes our proposal feasible. Further experimental evaluation shows that coronavirus-like symptoms (coughing/sneezing/runny nose) can be detected with an accuracy around 90 percent; in addition, the dry cough (more likely happening to COVID-19 patients) and wet cough can also be differentiated with high accuracy.