Reducing face-touches to limit COVID-19 outbreak: An overview of solutions

The lack of consolidated therapeutic protocols to counteract the COVID-19 has drawn attention to the social role of hygiene rules to prevent the escalation of infections. Particular focus has been put on the importance of limiting face-touch occurrences. Given that SARS-CoV-2 transmission can occur by self-inoculation, impeding the virus to reach eyes, nose or mouth is paramount to prevent infections. To deal with this aspect, several methods for estimating hand proximity to face and notifying the user about face-touch occurrences have been developed. In this overview, we present the most relevant, ready-to-use, and large-scale deployable solutions. Most of them consist in applications running on smartwatches/smartphones or relying on wearable accessories, e.g. smartbands. Although the use for the COVID-19 emergency nowadays is the most urgent application, these solutions can be employed in ordinary daily life as simple tools to discourage face-touching, decreasing the probability to get infections from the environment, or as habit reversal therapy.