IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2021 - 67

Many cities, and even some countries, were all
quarantined to prevent the spread of the virus.
While many domestic and international flights
were canceled, sports tournaments, international
events, concerts, and festivals were postponed to
a later date. All these measures were necessary
steps to stop the spread of the virus. So, how does
the virus spread? Human-to-human transmission
occurs through direct contact or by droplets that
spread through the infected person's cough or
sneeze. Infected droplets can reach up to 2 m distance and remain infectious for days.1 The contact
of the infected person with healthy individuals or
the time of being in the same environment
increases the probability of the transmission of
the disease.2
The measures taken to prevent the spread of
the virus bring daily life and economic activities
to a near-halt. The negative effects of the epidemic on economic and social life are increasing
day by day; therefore, countries plan to gradually relax coronavirus restrictions. However, as
in the case of many European countries, the second wave, in which new cases increase, may
emerge after restrictions were loosened. At this
point by using the technology, the spreading of
the virus can be stopped by enabling people
with signs and symptoms of Covid-19 to take
tests and isolate themselves; because it is
thought that patients are at the most contagious
stage when they are symptomatic.
In this article, we present a wrist-worn device
solution that is based on the Internet-of-MedicalThings (IoMT) to detect the symptoms of Covid19 in the early stages. The most common symptoms of the patients are fever, dry cough, fatigue,
anorexia, anosmia, and dyspnea.3,4 The earlier
we can detect such symptoms, the more we can
prevent the spread of the virus.
The parts of the article are arranged as follows. Section II presents a detailed literature
survey of the existing measurement methods
for the mentioned symptoms. The proposed
methodology is explained in Section III. The conclusions and further discussions on this article
are given in Section IV.

RELATED WORK
The most common symptoms that COVID-19
patients suffer are mentioned above. In this

March/April 2021

section, the details of these symptoms are
explained, and the measurement methods in the
literature are mentioned. Since the system we
have proposed is a wrist-worn wearable device,
studies in which measurements are taken from
the wrist are emphasized.

Fever
When a person is healthy, his/her body temperature is around 37 C under normal conditions. But when the body is faced with a virus or
bacteria, body temperature often goes up and
this results in fever. It can be said that fever is
one of the most important symptoms of illness
or infection, which was also mentioned in the
COVID-19 outbreak literature.
The traditional medical thermometers which
are used in many places to monitor people's
health conditions do not seem an efficient
method considering that many people need to
be measured. Wearable sensors seem a better
solution to overcome this handicap, besides
that kind of sensors can provide a continuous
measurement. Thus, unexpected body temperature increments, especially during sleep periods,
can be detected. Because many parameters need
to be measured with the body temperature, a
simpler structure can be created by using infrared thermopile sensors or high-accuracy digital
temperature sensors as used in many commercial products in the market.
Dry Cough
Cough is one of the important protection
mechanisms of the human body to clear the airway, and dry cough occurs in association with
viral infections of the upper respiratory tract.5
According to the studies on COVID-19, dry cough
is one of the commonest symptoms causing by
the 2019-nCoV virus. As already mentioned, the
virus spreads through droplets from an infected
person's cough. Therefore, it is very critical to
inform the patient at the early stages of the illness by detecting the abnormal increases of the
cough.
There are many studies in the literature for
the detection of cough through audio signals,
which can be obtained from microphone.6, 7
They got high cough detection rates by applying
filters, using signal processing methods, and

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2021

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