The Role of Wearable Devices in The Management of Covid-19 Disease: A Systematic Review

With the increase of the covid-19 epidemic, wearable devices have received a lot of attention in the field of managing this disease. The present systematic review study was conducted with the aim of investigating the role of wearable devices in the management of the covid-19 disease.

The present study was conducted according to the guidelines of PRISMA. For this purpose, Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus databases were searched to retrieve English articles without time limit, until August 16, 2022. The search strategy included the terms “Wearable Device” and “COVID-19”. The inclusion criteria for the study were original and English-language articles that have been carried out to design and implement wearable tools in managing Covid-19. All short articles, letters to the editor, conference abstracts, observational studies, review articles, as well as articles whose full version was not available and in a language other than English, as well as unimplemented items, were excluded from the study process. In order to evaluate the quality of articles, the AXIS evaluation tool was used to evaluate the quality of cross-sectional studies. After selecting the studies, data was collected based on the data extraction form. Then the data was analyzed through the content analysis method.

Finally, 10 articles were included in the present review and the wearable devices introduced in them were examined. Seventy percent  of wearable devices are used for symptom monitoring, health status, and quarantine, and 30% for diagnosis. The primary users of these tools were patients, the general public, doctors, and Authorities of statistics and information. The types of wearable devices used were bracelets and smart watches (60%), sensors (30%), pulse oximeters, and chest patches (10%).The most important capability and feature of wearable devices include transferring data and activities to mobile phones and low energy consumption. Using the AXIS quality assessment tool, four studies were rated as very good, five as good, and one as poor.

The review of studies showed that wearable devices provide many capabilities for disease monitoring and patient empowerment, disease diagnosis, and remote monitoring of vital signs of Covid-19 patients. These tools are presented in different forms. It is suggested to develop new tools with the aim of monitoring the covid-19 disease with an emphasis on the use of patients in the form of bracelets and smartwatches, and also the necessary attention should be paid to privacy and confidentiality issues.