Image Processing for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases

The new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) has spread to numerous countries around the world since several cases of the disease were first reported in late December 2019 in China. Currently, the WHO strongly recommends infection prevention measures such as wearing masks, hand washing, and frequent disinfection of high-touch surfaces, but there were many arguments against infection prevention policy in March 2020. For example, the WHO did not recommend the use of masks for the healthy general public. In Japan, wearing a mask was required before the habit of wearing a mask was established, which gave additional works of checking whether customer was wearing a mask to the employees. To reduce the workloads of employee and ensure mask-wearing, we started providing the mask-wearing system free of charge on March 5, 2020. We also developed hand washing time estimation and disinfection support system. It is useful to accumulate data on the status of implementation of countermeasures by our application, which leads to gain useful knowledge regarding countermeasures against COVID-19 as well as other infectious diseases. In this paper, we describe the development and introduction impacts of these systems in a pandemic emergencies. In addition, because of the security and privacy issues in running these image analysis applications, we discuss the delivery methods suitable for each service.