Role of Internet of Things (IoT) in diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained convincing research ground as a new research topic in a wide variety of academic and industrial disciplines, especially in healthcare. It is evolving healthcare systems from conventional to more personalized healthcare systems through which patients can be diagnosed, treated, and monitored more easily(M Nasajpour, S Pouriyeh, RM Parizi).

IoT can play major role in combating this dreadful pandemic, there are many researches carrying out and giving out positive outcomes. Social distancing is the only way in controlling this dreadful condition.

Social distancing plays an important role in limiting the spread of the virus together with countrywide lock-down and reduction of the workforce to essential workers only. New IoT technology to integrate social distancing in managing a global pandemic has been a major contributing factor to the evolution of IoT(Musa Ndiaye, Stephen S. Oyewobi)

As the world undergoes an ongoing battle against the deadly COVID-19 virus, we see rapid adoptions of IoT technologies towards monitoring and reduction of the virus spread.

Identifying an infected person in-crowd is very difficult. Isolating people from the infected is the only solution to avoid the spreading of this virus. The use of IoT with smart sensors to measure and record the body temperature of individuals will help to identify the infected. It will also help to maintain social distance. IoT based health care systems connected through cloud computing and using data analysis to make an effective decision based on real-time data can be used.

Role of internet in healthcare has played a vital role by enhancing the capacities and capabilities of Indian Healthcare system since last decade. In 21st century, when we talk about e-health/tele-health, it is considered to be the alternative strategy for paperless working which reduces the human errors in reporting, monitoring, diagnosis and treatment plan of infectious / non-communicable diseases. Introduction of Artificial Intelligence has made medical science to look-up with some different angle. During COVID -19 pandemic, internet has played an important role providing day-to-day updates on the incidence-prevalence statistics to the healthcare workers, sharing data with govt bodies nationally and internationally, dissemination of information related to precautions and NABL accredited lab facility for COVID testing, etc . Now when we talk about the vaccine mega drive which has started in phases in India, internet or lets say Information Technology would be helpful for the overall vaccine management plan.

One of the study published by Gómeza et al, Internet is the best tool for diagnosis of COVID-19 cases as according to existing data, questionnaires, and check results available in the database, the diagnosis is automatically generated as confirmed, suspected, or suspicious. The role of internet could be best implemented not only in case detection and diagnosis but during quarantine time and post recovery.

IoT is an application-specific, low power, effective, and easy to use kind of solution of any real-time problems. There are the sensors which are the input providers from the physical world, which transferred over a network, and actuators allow things to act or react according to the input received from sensors. Some of them like camera, IR thermometer, smart watches, etc can store and retrieve data from things using the HTTP protocol over the Internet or via a Local Area Network.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many research organisations around the world have been involved in utilizing several Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to fight the deadly coronavirus infection. In the context of coronavirus infection, IoT enabled applications or devices have been used to prevent the spread of disease among the uninfected populations through early diagnosis, monitoring patients, and practising defined protocols after the recovery of the patients. However, this domain has been affected due to the global pandemic. The following article focusses on a survey related to the impact of COVID-19 on IoT technologies. It highlights all the rapid and successful efforts that IoT and related sensor technologies been made towards virus tracing, tracking and spread mitigation. The challenges related to the deployment of sensor hardware in the face of a rapidly spreading disease have been looked into as part of the study. The effects of the global pandemic on the evolution of IoT architectures and management have also been discussed, leading to the likely outcomes on future IoT implementations. In conclusion, the study provides an insight into the advancement of sensor-based E-health towards the management of future pandemics while answering the question of how a global pandemic is shaping the future of IoT networks. ( //ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9220109)

At a time when the whole world is fighting the same enemy, we have all had to embrace new technologies and discover their benefits, although there is still a long way to go. As a result, COVID-19 may well have been the embodiment of the Internet of Things (IoT)......

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