Energy-Efficient Monitoring of Potential Side Effects from COVID-19 Vaccines

Weipeng Deng, Edith C. H. Ngai, Vera van Zoest

Abstract: COVID-19 has affected the world for almost two years causing lots of damages and losses of lives. With the development of sensing technology and digital health, recent research studies suggest to use wearable devices for monitoring COVID-19 symptoms or analyzing people’s behaviour change. As COVID-19 vaccines are getting widely available, their side effects have raised public concerns, though have not yet been thoroughly studied due to the short deployment time. As far as we know, this work is the first study to use wearable devices and mobile app to collect physiological data to explore potential side effects to human bodies from COVID-19 vaccinations. We designed and developed a mobile sensing system, which can monitor changes of physiological indicators through wearable devices, collect self-reported data from the users and proposed a green data transmission mechanism which can reduce the communication overheads. Pilot study has been conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our system. Preliminary results show that increased resting heart rate (RHR) and changes on average heart rate (HR) are observed in some participants after COVID-19 vaccinations. This study opens up the opportunity to collect larger amount of data and further investigate potential side effects from COVID-19 vaccinations.