An international task force, including two University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists, concludes in new research that mobile health (mHealth) technologies are a viable option to monitor COVID-19 patients at home and predict which ones will need medical intervention.
The technologies – including wearable sensors, electronic patient-reported data and digital contact tracing – also could be used to monitor and predict coronavirus exposure in people presumed to be free of infection, providing information that could help prioritize diagnostic testing.
The 60-member panel, with members from Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and across the U.S., was led by Harvard Medical School associate professor Paolo Bonato, director of the Motion Analysis Lab at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. UMass Amherst task force members Sunghoon Ivan Lee and Tauhidur Rahman, both assistant professors in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, focused their review on mobile health sensors, their area of expertise.
The team’s study, “Can mHealth Technology Help Mitigate the Effects of the COVID 19 Pandemic?” was published Wednesday in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.
Read more at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Image: Sunghoon Ivan Lee is an assistant professor in the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences. (Credit: UMass Amherst)