Towards a Low-cost and Mobile System for Quarantine Tracking during Pandemics

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the coronavirus pandemic has caused and continues to cause a large number of deaths today. Governments all over the world have taken measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Home quarantine was proven to be a successful way to control and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The current methods of tracking home-quarantined people use tracking bracelets or mobile applications, which are still in their early development stage. In this paper, we propose a quarantine tracking system to track users during their quarantine period. The system consists of a web portal designed for the concerned authorities and the quarantined user's mobile application. The proposed application randomly prompts users to verify their quarantine by uploading their selfies. We verify the user's quarantine status through an automatic location and selfie verification. Our system provides a specific set of features that can be set by the concerned authorities, such as the frequency of prompts and the allowed response time. Violation reports can also be accessed by the concerned authorities to keep track of quarantined users' violations. Our results validate the usefulness and potential of our system as a quarantine tracking tool. It also opens the door for further development, allowing governments to handle any upcoming pandemics. © 2021 IEEE.