IEEE Access (Jan 2021)

<italic>i</italic>Worksafe: Towards Healthy Workplaces During COVID-19 With an Intelligent Phealth App for Industrial Settings

  • M. Shamim Kaiser,
  • Mufti Mahmud,
  • Manan Binth Taj Noor,
  • Nusrat Zerin Zenia,
  • Shamim Al Mamun,
  • K. M. Abir Mahmud,
  • Saiful Azad,
  • V. N. Manjunath Aradhya,
  • Punitha Stephan,
  • Thompson Stephan,
  • Ramani Kannan,
  • Mohammed Hanif,
  • Tamanna Sharmeen,
  • Tianhua Chen,
  • Amir Hussain

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3050193
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9
pp. 13814 – 13828

Abstract

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The recent outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has given rise to diverse health issues due to its high transmission rate and limited treatment options. Almost the whole world, at some point of time, was placed in lock-down in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, with resulting psychological and economic sequela. As countries start to ease lock-down measures and reopen industries, ensuring a healthy workplace for employees has become imperative. Thus, this paper presents a mobile app-based intelligent portable healthcare (pHealth) tool, called i WorkSafe, to assist industries in detecting possible suspects for COVID-19 infection among their employees who may need primary care. Developed mainly for low-end Android devices, the i WorkSafe app hosts a fuzzy neural network model that integrates data of employees' health status from the industry's database, proximity and contact tracing data from the mobile devices, and user-reported COVID-19 self-test data. Using the built-in Bluetooth low energy sensing technology and K Nearest Neighbor and K-means techniques, the app is capable of tracking users' proximity and trace contact with other employees. Additionally, it uses a logistic regression model to calculate the COVID-19 self-test score and a Bayesian Decision Tree model for checking real-time health condition from an intelligent e-health platform for further clinical attention of the employees. Rolled out in an apparel factory on 12 employees as a test case, the pHealth tool generates an alert to maintain social distancing among employees inside the industry. In addition, the app helps employees to estimate risk with possible COVID-19 infection based on the collected data and found that the score is effective in estimating personal health condition of the app user.

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