IMU-based monitoring of discharged patients with COVID-19 for the assessment of in-home recovering

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2, is a major current public health problem worldwide. It is crucial to recognize that recovery of patients with COVID-19 does not end with the hospital discharge but rather begins, and improving daily physical activity (PA) seems crucial to this recovery. Thus, characterizing PA in patients with COVID-19 after discharge should be a priority in public health. Furthermore, reporting the impact of COVID-19 on the functional status and PA in the long-running follow-up of patients would allow to understand the evolution and prognosis of the disease and develop a strategy of its management [1]. Hence, we aim to investigate PA and functional status in patients who suffered from COVID-19 across the severity of the disease. This paper describes the algorithm developed for the estimation of PA from data collected with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and the preliminary results of the objective evidence of the improvement of activity level over time.