Soft wearable sensors for monitoring symptoms of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases: a review

The COVID-19 pandemic has put extraordinary stress on medical systems and global society more broadly. The condition of infected patients may deteriorate rapidly due to overburdened hospital systems. This raises an urgent need for real-time and remote monitoring of physiological parameters to address the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This review will present recent progress on soft wearable sensors that can potentially be used for monitoring respiratory diseases such as COVID-19. First, emerging monitoring devices and systems that can monitor key physiological parameters as suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (e.g. body temperature, respiration rate, heart rate, oxygen saturation and body movement) are reviewed. Then, multimodal sensor systems consisting of two or more correlative sensors are presented. This review will conclude with challenges and future directions for wearable sensors for the diagnosis and therapy of respiratory diseases. While this review focuses on COVID-19, the sensing technologies reviewed can be applicable to other respiratory diseases such as H1N1 influenza.