A Comprehensive Survey of Enabling and Emerging Technologies for Social Distancing—Part I: Fundamentals and Enabling Technologies

TLDR

Social distancing reduces the spread of viral diseases such as COVID‑19 by minimizing close physical contact. The paper surveys how emerging technologies—wireless, networking, and artificial intelligence—can enable, encourage, and enforce social distancing. It reviews foundational concepts, models, and practical scenarios, then examines enabling wireless technologies and other emerging tools, and identifies open challenges such as privacy, scheduling, and incentives. The review shows that these technologies support symptom prediction, monitoring, and contact tracing, and recommends embedding pandemic modes in future smart infrastructure designs.

Abstract

Social distancing plays a pivotal role in preventing the spread of viral diseases illnesses such as COVID-19. By minimizing the close physical contact among people, we can reduce the chances of catching the virus and spreading it across the community. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on how emerging technologies, e.g., wireless and networking, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable, encourage, and even enforce social distancing practice. To that end, we first provide a comprehensive background of social distancing including basic concepts, measurements, models, and propose various practical social distancing scenarios. We then discuss enabling wireless technologies which are especially effective and can be widely adopted in practice to keep distance, encourage, and enforce social distancing in general. After that, other emerging and related technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, thermal, ultrasound, etc., are introduced. These technologies open many new solutions and directions to deal with problems in social distancing, e.g., symptom prediction, detection and monitoring quarantined people, and contact tracing. Finally, we provide important open issues and challenges (e.g., privacy-preserving, scheduling, and incentive mechanisms) in implementing social distancing in practice. As an example, instead of reacting with ad-hoc responses to COVID-19-like pandemics in the future, smart infrastructures (e.g., next-generation wireless systems like 6G, smart home/building, smart city, intelligent transportation systems) should incorporate a pandemic mode in its standard architecture/design.