Smart Face Masks for Covid-19 Pandemic Management: A Concise Review of Emerging Architectures, Challenges and Future Research Directions

Fagbola, Temitayo M.; Fagbola, Funmilola I.; Aroba, Oluwasegun J.; Doshi, Ruchi; Hiran, Kamal Kant; Thakur, Surendra Colin

Abstract

Smart sensing technology has been playing tremendous roles in digital healthcare management over time with great impacts. Lately, smart sensing has awoken the world by the advent of Smart Face Masks (SFM) in the global fight against the deadly Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. In turn, a number of research studies on innovative SFM architectures and designs are emerging. However, there is currently no study that has systematically been conducted to identify and comparatively analyze the emerging architectures and designs of SFMs, their contributions, socio-technological implications, and current challenges. In this paper, we investigate the emerging SFMs in response to Covid-19 pandemic and provide a concise review of their key features and characteristics, design, smart technologies, and architectures. We also highlight and discuss the socio-technological opportunities posed by the use of SFMs and finally present directions for future research. Our findings reveal four key features that can be used to evaluate SFMs to include reusability, self-power generation ability, energy awareness and aerosol filtration efficiency. We discover that SFM has potential for effective use in human tracking, contact tracing, disease detection and diagnosis or in monitoring asymptotic populations in future pandemics. Some SFMs have also been carefully designed to provide comfort and safety when used by patients with other respiratory diseases or comorbidities. However, some identified challenges include standards and quality control, ethical, security and privacy concerns.

Citation

Fagbola, T. M., Fagbola, F. I., Aroba, O. J., Doshi, R., Hiran, K. K., & Thakur, S. C. (2023). Smart Face Masks for Covid-19 Pandemic Management: A Concise Review of Emerging Architectures, Challenges and Future Research Directions. IEEE sensors journal, 23(2), 877-888. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2022.3225067

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 2, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Dec 2, 2022
• Publication Date: Jan 15, 2023
• Deposit Date: Mar 16, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 14, 2024
• Journal: IEEE Sensors Journal
• Print ISSN: 1530-437X
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-1748
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 877-888
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2022.3225067
• Keywords: Aerosol; Coronavirus; COVID-19; Mask technology; Material science; Nanotechnology; Pandemic management; Smart face mask (SFM); Smart sensing
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4163183