ABSTRACT
With the increasing improvement of quality of life (QOL), health has become an item of concern. However, owing to Covid-19, most organizations cannot do annual health check-ups because they require contact with people and it is difficult to maintain social distance. Consequently, in an era of increasing epidemics, non-contact methods are paramount. In this paper, we present a non-contact breathing and heart rate measurement system integrated into an application using 24 GHz medical radar to support the health check work. In this system, we solve the problem of imbalance between the two signal channels of the radar to increase the accuracy of the breathing and heart rate extraction. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: On July 22, 2020, the Japanese government launched the "Go to Travel" campaign that subsidizes 50% of personal travel expenditure to support the tourism industry under the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy was controversial from the viewpoint of infection spread and was temporarily cancelled in December 2020, though there was no statistical evidence. Methods: This is the first study that measures the extent to which this campaign increased COVID-19 cases. This study regards the campaign as a natural experiment: although Tokyo and its commuting areas experienced the same time-series trends of COVID-19 cases before the "Go To Travel" campaign, this campaign was implemented in areas outside Tokyo, but not in Tokyo. Then, the comparison (difference-in-differences) yields the campaign's effect. Results: The estimation shows that the "Go To Travel" campaign significantly raised the increment rate of cases by 23.7%-34.4% during July 30-August 4. There is no significant effect after August 5. In addition, our simulation identified the number of campaign-related cases in each city. Conclusions: Although the campaign significantly spread COVID-19, the effect was not continuous to permanently change the time-series trend.