A New Low-Cost and Accurate Diagnostic mHealth System for Patients with COVID-19 Pneumonia

Abstract

Over the last two years, COVID-19 pneumonia has killed more than six million people worldwide. To self-triage pneumonia patients, many mobile Health (mHealth) solutions have been developed. Some of these solutions only provide guidelines and trace outbreaks. Others collect inaccurate vitals and/or are considered costly. To address these challenges, a cost-effective and accurate mHealth system was designed in this paper. The system consists of several biosensors (e.g., oxygen saturation) as they are considered significant for the disease assessment. In addition, a new mobile application was developed to collect biometric vitals and transmit them to a HIPPA compliant server. Our real-world experiments demonstrated that the new system was strongly correlated with the gold standard systems in terms of pulse rate and temperature (e.g., 90%). Moreover, the difference in the rate of change between the two systems for the measurements were mostly insignificant (e.g., $p-\text{value} \approx 0.77$). Lastly, the prototype cost is approximately $20 USD.