Physical activity and asthma symptom control in children during COVID-19 lockdown: A feasibility study.

Objective: The aim was to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on physical activity (PA) and asthma symptom control in children. Methods: We conducted a single-cohort observational study on 22 children with a median age of 9 (8-11) years with a diagnosis of asthma being included in the study. Participants were asked to wear a PA tracker for 3 months; during the same 3-month period, the Paediatric Asthma Diary (PAD) was administered daily and the Asthma Control (AC) Questionnaire together with the mini-Paediatric Asthma Quality of Life (AQoL) Questionnaire administered at weekly intervals. Results: Compared with the pre-lockdown period, there was a significant reduction in PA levels after the lockdown began. Daily total steps reduced by about 3000 steps (p < 0.001), very active minutes by 9 min (p < 0.001) and fairly active minutes almost halved (p < 0.001); while asthma symptom control marginally improved, with the AC and AQoL score improving by 0.56 (p < 0.005) and 0.47 (p < 0.05), respectively. Further, for those with AC score higher than 1, PA was positively associated with asthma control both before and after the lockdown. Conclusions: This feasibility study suggests that PA engagement of children with asthma is negatively affected during the pandemic, but the beneficial effect of PA on asthma symptom control potentially sustains even during a lockdown period. These findings emphasize the importance of wearable device to monitor longitudinal PA and thus better management of PA for achieving the best outcome of asthma symptom control.

Wearable Sensing and Telehealth Technology with Potential Applications in the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as a pandemic with serious clinical manifestations including death. A pandemic at the large-scale like COVID-19 places extraordinary demands on the world's health systems, dramatically devastates vulnerable populations, and critically threatens the global communities in an unprecedented way. While tremendous efforts at the frontline are placed on detecting the virus, providing treatments and developing vaccines, it is also critically important to examine the technologies and systems for tackling disease emergence, arresting its spread and especially the strategy for diseases prevention. The objective of this article is to review enabling technologies and systems with various application scenarios for handling the COVID-19 crisis. The article will focus specifically on 1) wearable devices suitable for monitoring the populations at risk and those in quarantine, both for evaluating the health status of caregivers and management personnel, and for facilitating triage processes for admission to hospitals; 2) unobtrusive sensing systems for detecting the disease and for monitoring patients with relatively mild symptoms whose clinical situation could suddenly worsen in improvised hospitals; and 3) telehealth technologies for the remote monitoring and diagnosis of COVID-19 and related diseases. Finally, further challenges and opportunities for future directions of development are highlighted.

Examination of Potential of Thermopile-Based Contactless Respiratory Gating.

To control the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is effective to perform a fast screening of the respiratory rate of the subject at the gate before entering a space to assess the potential risks. In this paper, we examine the potential of a novel yet cost-effective solution, called thermopile-based respiratory gating, to contactlessly screen a subject by measuring their respiratory rate in the scenario with an entrance gate. Based on a customized thermopile array system, we investigate different image and signal processing methods that measure respiratory rate from low-resolution thermal videos, where an automatic region-of-interest selection-based approach obtains a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.8 breaths per minute. We show the feasibility of thermopile-based respiratory gating and quantify its limitations and boundary conditions in a benchmark (e.g., appearance of face mask, measurement distance and screening time). The technical validation provided by this study is helpful for designing and implementing a respiratory gating solution toward the prevention of the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

Recommendation to Use Wearable-Based mHealth in Closed-Loop Management of Acute Cardiovascular Disease Patients During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Because of the rapid and serious nature of acute cardiovascular disease (CVD) especially ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), a leading cause of death worldwide, prompt diagnosis and treatment is of crucial importance to reduce both mortality and morbidity. During a pandemic such as coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), it is critical to balance cardiovascular emergencies with infectious risk. In this work, we recommend using wearable device based mobile health (mHealth) as an early screening and real-time monitoring tool to address this balance and facilitate remote monitoring to tackle this unprecedented challenge. This recommendation may help to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of acute CVD patient management while reducing infection risk.