Abstract
Hand-to-Face transmission has been estimated to be a minority, yet non-negligible, vector of COVID-19 transmission and a major vector for multiple other pathogens. At the same time, as it cannot be effectively addressed with mainstream protection measures, such as wearing masks or tracing contacts, it remains largely untackled. To help address this issue, we have developed Saving Face - an app that alerts users when they are about to touch their faces, by analyzing the distortion patterns in the ultrasound signal emitted by their earphones. The system only relies on pre-existing hardware (a smartphone with generic earphones), which allows it to be rapidly scalable to billions of smartphone users worldwide. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of the system, as well as the results of a user study testing the solution's accuracy, robustness, and user experience during various day-to-day activities (93.7% Sensitivity and 91.5% Precision, N=10). While this paper focuses on the system's application to detecting hand-to-face gestures, the technique can also be applicable to other types of gestures and gesture-based applications.
Highlights
By January 28, 2021, more than 100 million people had contracted COVID-19, almost half in the last 2 months alone, and over 2.1 million had lost their lives [10]
The CDC and researchers analyzing infection clusters estimate that hand-to-face transmission accounts for 5-10% of COVID-19 cases [46] due to the virus’ ability to survive on commonly used surfaces for multiple days [41]
In the remainder of this section, we review in further detail the existing technologies that can be used to track hand-to-face movements through Awareness Enhancement Devices (AEDs)
Summary
By January 28, 2021, more than 100 million people had contracted COVID-19, almost half in the last 2 months alone, and over 2.1 million had lost their lives [10]. Existing AEDs typically rely on custom hardware, making them difficult to rapidly manufacture and largely inaccessible to the broad population To help address these limitations, we propose Saving Face - a system that tracks hand-to-face movements and alerts users when they touch their faces, while only relying on their smartphones and a set of generic headsets (see Figure 1). Saving Face must overcome these challenges while relying entirely on existing smartphones and earsets, i.e., without requiring any hardware or firmware modifications and without rooting the phone This is necessary in order to build a scalable and user-friendly solution for mitigating pathogen surface transmissions. We will discuss our current limitations and future research direction (Section 8) and highlight our main conclusions and acknowledgements (Sections 9 and 10 respectively)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
