Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 26;23(3):1397. doi: 10.3390/s23031397.
COVID-19 is highly contagious and spreads rapidly; it can be transmitted through coughing or contact with virus-contaminated hands, surfaces, or objects. The virus spreads faster indoors and in crowded places; therefore, there is a huge demand for contact tracing applications in indoor environments, such as hospitals and offices, in order to measure personnel proximity while placing as little load on them as possible. Contact tracing is a vital step in controlling and restricting pandemic spread; however, traditional contact tracing is time-consuming, exhausting, and ineffective. As a result, more research and application of smart digital contact tracing is necessary. As the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable sensor device studies have grown in popularity, this work has been based on the practicality and successful implementation of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and radio frequency identification (RFID) IoT based wireless systems for achieving contact tracing. Our study presents autonomous, low-cost, long-battery-life wireless sensing systems for contact tracing applications in hospital/office environments; these systems are developed with off-the-shelf components and do not rely on end user participation in order to prevent any inconvenience. Performance evaluation of the two implemented systems is carried out under various real practical settings and scenarios; these two implemented centralised IoT contact tracing devices were tested and compared demonstrating their efficiency results.
新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）具有很强的传染性，传播速度很快；它可以通过咳嗽或接触受病毒污染的手、表面或物体传播。病毒在室内和拥挤的地方传播得更快；因此，在医院和办公室等室内环境中，对接触者追踪应用程序的需求巨大，以便在尽可能减少对人员负担的情况下测量人员之间的距离。接触者追踪是控制和限制大流行传播的重要步骤；然而，传统的接触者追踪既耗时、又费力，而且效果不佳。因此，需要更多的智能数字接触者追踪的研究和应用。随着物联网（IoT）和可穿戴传感器设备研究的普及，这项工作基于蓝牙低能耗（BLE）和射频识别（RFID）物联网的实用性和成功实施，开发了基于无线系统的接触者追踪应用。我们的研究提出了用于医院/办公室环境中接触者追踪应用的自主、低成本、长电池寿命无线感测系统；这些系统是使用现成的组件开发的，不依赖于最终用户的参与，以防止任何不便。在各种实际设置和场景下，对两个实现的系统进行了性能评估；这两个已实现的集中式物联网接触追踪设备经过测试和比较，展示了它们的效率结果。
