Analysis of Mobile Sensing Applications for Pandemic Monitoring

Mobile sensing applications are software programs that are written for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, whose collective purpose is to turn the user and the device into a sensor for data collection. These applications require the user's approval to access certain features within the device and its operating system. Mobile sensing systems have a wide variety of applications to provide researchers with real data that they can use to solve problems such as air quality monitoring, contact tracing, medical resource allocation, among others. In this paper, our goal is to analyze different mobile sensing applications (app) that are particularly developed for pandemic monitoring. We classified such apps into two groups, one that performs contact tracing and the other is non-contact tracing applications. We present detailed description of several highly used pandemic monitoring mobile applications, noting pros and cons of each.