Technical Perspectives of Contact-Tracing Applications on Wearables for COVID-19 Control
Viktoriia Shubina, Aleksandr Ometov, Elena Simona Lohan
Abstract
The wearables' market is rapidly evolving, with applications ranging from healthcare and activity monitoring to emerging domains such as drones and haptic helmets. Wearable-based contact tracing is gaining increased attention in the COVID-19 era for more efficient disease prevention. Therefore, it is of timely relevance to identify the leading existing wireless contact-tracing solutions and their suitability for wearables. Existing trade-offs of contact-tracing applications require a thorough analysis of technical capabilities, such as accuracy, energy consumption, availability, sources of errors when dealing with wireless channels, privacy challenges, and deterrents towards a large-scale adoption on the wearables market. Based on extensive literature research, we conclude that decentralized architectures generally offer a better place in a trade-off in terms of accuracy and user eagerness to adopt them, taking into account privacy considerations, compared to centralized approaches. Our paper provides a brief technical overview of the existing solutions deployed for contact tracing, defines main principles that affect the overall efficacy of digital contact tracing, and presents a discussion on the potential effect of wearables in tackling the spread of a highly contagious virus.