Social-Distancing Monitoring Using Portable Electronic Devices

The coronavirus pandemic is an ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by a virus. The virus is mainly spread through close contact and respiratory droplets produced when people cough or sneeze. Recommended measures to prevent the spread of the infection include maintaining social distancing. As a result of these recommendations, there is a need to monitor and maintain physical distance between people in real-time and alert people of any deviation from recommended distancing. This publication describes systems and techniques for portable electronic devices, such as smartphones, tablets, smartglasses, and smartwatches, to measure and analyze the distance between a user and other people. For example, a portable electronic device can be used to detect potential deviations from recommended social distancing using a radar sensor. In aspects, the portable electronic device, using an on-device machine-learned model, evaluates measured data to generate appropriate alerts for the user