Abstract—With the unprecedented outbreak of unknown pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, a new coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), aroused the attention of the entire world. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified the pneumonia as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and declared it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Worldwide, several countries have adopted social distancing as the main strategy of limiting the spread of the virus. In this paper, we explored the effectiveness of the indoor positioning system based on Ultra-WideBand (UWB) technology specifically for keeping a social distance for the prevention of the COVID-19 infection in the workplace. In static and dynamic experiments, our verified system demonstrated a real-time 3D millimeter accuracy and simultaneous tracking of multiple wearable tags that successfully visualized in the 3D space, which provide an enough accuracy 3D positioning of around 100-150 mm for the monitoring of the infection process. The results indicated that 3D tracking of multiple tags effectively work in the real-time manner with a high accuracy 3D positioning, which is applicable to further detail analyses of how an infection happen and why a social distancing is important for the prevention.

Index Terms—Indoor positioning, IMU, inertial sensors, COVID-19, ultra-wideband.

Ahmed M. M. Almassri and Natsuki Shirasawa are with Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japan.
Hiroaki Wagatsuma is with Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japan. He is also with RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS), Japan.

Cite:Ahmed M. M. Almassri, Natsuki Shirasawa, Hiroaki Wagatsuma, "Real-Time Social Distancing for Tackling COVID-19 in Workplaces Using Wearable Inertial Sensor," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 58-64, 2021.
 

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