Proxemic Interactions in Mobile Devices to Avoid the Spreading of Infections

Currently, people’s daily lives are affected by the pandemic produced by the COVID-19. One of the main problem is the quickly and easy spreading of the virus. Healthcare workers are affected by nosocomial infections (also called as hospital-acquired infections) that exist in workplaces and more specifically, from health care equipment. In practice, the use of technology is quite common in health care settings. However, due to the touchability of mobile digital devices, their use contributes to nosocomial infections, according to several studies. Some applications based on tracking people have been implemented in order to facilitate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and preventing contamination of surfaces by people’s hands. Notwithstanding, their use still presents limitations related to implementing applications to be used in some hospital environments, such as care rooms, laboratories, clinical workrooms. To overcome these limitations, we propose the use of interpersonal distances and proxemic dimensions (i.e., Distance, Identity, Location, Movement, and orientation- DILMO) for implementing HCI with mobile devices that reduces their touchability. The aim is to facilitate the development of mobile apps with proxemic HCI, supported in a proposed architecture, to stop spreading of nosocomial infection of COVID-19 and others. To show the usability and suitability of our proposal, we present two prototypes of apps for mobile devices as proof-of concept, using several combination of proxemic DILMO dimensions to model proxemic HCI that allow flexibility in interpersonal and devices people interactions.