Remote monitoring contributes to preventing overwork-related events in health workers on the COVID-19 frontlines

Fighting at the frontlines against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the health workers are at high risk of virus infection and overwork-related sudden death and disorders including cardiovascular diseases and stress. When we noticed the increase of overwork-related sudden deaths in physicians and nurses in the first two weeks after lockdown of Wuhan, we organized the ‘Touching Your Heart’ program by remote monitoring, aiming to protect health workers from overwork-related disorders through integrated volunteer work by physicians and medical engineering researchers from Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital, Nanjing Medical University and Tiangong University. By remotely monitoring the health condition of the medical aid team working at Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital, the program successfully helped in avoiding severe overwork-related events in them. The result of our program reminded the frontline health workers around the world to take precaution against overworked-related severe events, and showed that precision monitoring is effective in improving work efficiency and maintaining sustainable work force during the emergency situations like a pandemic.