H-Watch: An Open, Connected Platform for AI-Enhanced COVID19 Infection Symptoms Monitoring and Contact Tracing

TL;DR

H-Watch is an open-source wearable platform integrating sensors, wireless communication, and machine learning for early COVID-19 symptom detection and contact tracing, with extended battery life and accessible hardware/software.

Contribution

This paper introduces H-Watch, a fully open-source, multi-sensor wearable device designed specifically for COVID-19 detection and contact tracing, with optimized power consumption.

Findings

Power consumption of 5.9 mW enabling 9-day battery life

Successful integration of sensors, wireless modules, and machine learning on MCU

Open-source hardware and software for research and development

Abstract

The novel COVID-19 disease has been declared a pandemic event. Early detection of infection symptoms and contact tracing are playing a vital role in containing COVID-19 spread. As demonstrated by recent literature, multi-sensor and connected wearable devices might enable symptom detection and help tracing contacts, while also acquiring useful epidemiological information. This paper presents the design and implementation of a fully open-source wearable platform called H-Watch. It has been designed to include several sensors for COVID-19 early detection, multi-radio for wireless transmission and tracking, a microcontroller for processing data on-board, and finally, an energy harvester to extend the battery lifetime. Experimental results demonstrated only 5.9 mW of average power consumption, leading to a lifetime of 9 days on a small watch battery. Finally, all the hardware and the software, including a machine learning on MCU toolkit, are provided open-source, allowing the research community to build and use the H-Watch.