As It is established that several corona viruses are already endemic in humans, it can be posited that the cycle of flu like break outs, epidemics and pandemics will not end.
Beginning with the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history ie the Spanish Flu and now Covid19, these flu like infections have major repercussions on human mortality. Comparatively, the Spanish flu had a mortality rate of 2.5% killing; 1.7% of the then world population, the novel Covid 19 pandemic has been given a mortality rate of 3.4%a figure that is increasing daily. This exponential growth in infections will only drop as more people are tested, confirmed positive then isolation and treatment embarked on.
Unfortunately, herein lies the problem; developing countries including our country are under equipped to identify and diagnose patients. Specifically, the ability to test mass populations is hampered by non-availability of test commodities. This leaves health professionals to allocate testing resources to selected populations as a priority then as and when other resources will be availed, mass population based testing can be done. Clearly, innovative ways of screening, early warning, surveillance for the virus are still required.
We propose a mobile app for self screening for Covid19 by assessing symptoms of infection such as heart rate, temperature, breathing rate, heart rate and cough. This will be enabled by applying IoT technology and using sensors attached to a SMART mobile device. We shall include algorithms for tracking a person’s location to facilitate patient tracking post recovery and follow-up. We also propose to create an interface in the app that will facilitate this data from patients to be received by health professionals and facilities and the Ministry of health. It is noted that several apps that perform one or another of these singly already exist as seen in the videos below, however our proposed app will integrate all these into one app that can be used detect Codiv19 holistically.
As well as acting as a valuable first step in providing the early warning systems for Covid19, the possibility of modifying the same app for use in other infectious diseases is noted.
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