Telemedicine, today more than ever. The ABBRACCI design concept for COVID-19 patient monitoring

In times of COVID-19, where keeping distances is essential to safeguard people's health and life, remotely monitoring infected patients both in hospitals and homes becomes vital. Telemedicine is the key to ensure healthcare assistance by minimizing human-to-human exposure and the spread of the virus. Evidence suggests that during the first pandemic wave in 2020, COVID-19 spreading took place to a great extent in hospitals, nurse houses, senior living communities, and more generally among healthcare workers and patients. Today more than ever, technological solutions that provide remote healthcare are needed to mitigate the infections among health system personnel and patients. In this paper, we propose a multidisciplinary design solution: ABBRACCI, an AI-based smart wearable device for COVID-19 patient monitoring and care, that is meant to be a tool to monitor the health and wellbeing of people diagnosed with COVID-19 – both critical hospitalized patients and non-severe ones that have been confined at home – but also people at high risk of infection who suffer from chronic diseases and multimorbidity.