Social Sensing and Human in the Loop Profiling during Pandemics: the Vitoria application

TL;DR

This paper presents a human-in-the-loop cyber-physical system that passively and actively collects data during a pandemic to monitor behaviors, provide personalized feedback, and analyze correlations with Covid events, demonstrated through a three-month trial in Portugal.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative system integrating passive and active data collection for pandemic monitoring and personal feedback, validated through a real-world field trial.

Findings

Application usage patterns vary between work and non-work periods.

Time-lagged correlations exist between collected metrics, Covid events, and media news.

The system can support self-regulation and awareness during pandemics.

Abstract

As the number of smart devices that surround us increases, so do the opportunities to leverage them to create socially- and context-aware systems. Smart devices can be used for better understanding human behaviour and its societal implications. As an example of a scenario in which the role of socially aware systems is crucial, consider the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In this paper we present an innovative Humanin-The-Loop Cyber Physical system that can collect passive data from people, such as physical activity, sleep information, and discrete location, as well as collect self-reported data, and provide individualised user feedback. In this paper, we also present a three and a half months field trial implemented in Portugal. This trial was part of a larger scope project that was supported by the Portuguese National Health System, to evaluate the indicators and effects of the pandemic. Results concerning various applications usage statistics are presented, comparing the most used applications, their objective and their usage pattern in work/non-work periods. Additionally,the time-lagged cross correlation between some of the collected metrics, Covid events, and media news, are explored. This type of applications can be used not only in the context of Covid but also in future pandemics, to assist individuals in self-regulation of their contagion risk, based on personalized information, while also function as a means for raising self-awareness of risks related to psychological wellbeing.