Violation Detection Technique for COVID-19 Self-Isolation and Control Measures using Wireless and Geofencing Technologies

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic forced the governments to apply severe control measures such as lockdowns and quarantines. This lead to the need for innovative digital health technological solutions to increase the effectiveness of the necessary precautionary. In this regard, a smart geofencing solution is proposed in this paper to effectively support the implementation of COVID-19 self-isolation and control measures in different areas where each intended area is defined as a geofence with specific control actions. The proposed solution is based on a mobile client application that exploits specific wireless metrics for Wi-Fi and cellular networks to generate a digital signature for the defined geofence and detects any violation of its virtual borders. A detailed description along with a mathematical model of how the geofence digital signature can be created is presented. Then, a geofence matching criterion based on a weighted score is proposed to detect the geofence violation by comparing the periodically measured wireless metrics with the created geofence digital signature. The proposed solution can be used for detecting violation in different cases such as distributed home quarantine and controlled areas. The performance of the proposed solution is studied on different scenarios, and the results show the significance of the proposed solution compared to others. Moreover, the effect of the decision time window parameter on the performance of the proposed geofence matching criterion is illustrated.