A paper authored by Michigan Tech Assistant Professor Bo Chen, Computer Science, and Data Science master’s student Shashank Reddy Danda, has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet of Things Magazine special issue on Smart IoT Solutions for Combating COVID-19 Pandemic. The special issue will be published in September 2020.
The title of the paper is,
The paper, “Towards Mitigating Spreading of Coronavirus via Mobile Devices,” focuses on Chen’s research of COVID-19 prevention through the leveraging of computing technology. The project is currently supported by a Michigan Tech College of Computing seed grant, and external funding for further development is being pursued.
Download a preprint of the paper here.
Abstract:
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 the chance of healthy people from being exposed to it. Having observed the fact that most viruses come from coughing/sneezing/runny nose of infected people, in this work we propose to detect such symptom events via mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, smart watches, and other IoT devices) possessed by most people in modern world and, to instantly broadcast locations where the symptoms have been observed to other people. This would be able to significantly reduce risk that healthy people get exposed to the viruses. The 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%; in addition, the dry cough (more likely happening to COVID-19 patients) and wet cough can also be differentiated with a high accuracy.
Bo Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His areas of expertise include mobile device security, cloud computing security, named data networking security, big data security, and blockchain.
Shashank Reddy Danda is an MS student in Data Science. He is currently working as a research assistant in MTU Security and Privacy (SnP) Lab under the supervision of Dr. Bo Chen.
IEEE Internet of Things Magazine (IEEE IoTM) is a publication of the IEEE Internet of Things Initiative, a Multi-Society Technical Group.