Protecting Health Care Workers from Infectious Diseases using Physical Proximity Networks (PPN)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major global health threat, and Health Care Workers (HCWs) may have an increased risk of infection through occupational exposure. In the case of hospital outbreaks, contact tracing of close physical interaction needs to be performed. In this article, we propose an IoT-connected contact tracing system based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons for subject identification and data transmission. The proposed system consists of BLE receivers, BLE wearable tags, an edge gateway and a cloud server. The system records interaction information such as entering/exiting time of an HCW to isolation rooms in the hospital. The collected data will be further analyzed to inform infection prevention policies. The performance of the proposed system is assessed through qualitative and quantitative experimental results. Finally, the capabilities of the current system and future research directions are briefly discussed.