Covid-Safe: An Iot-Based System for Automated Health Monitoring and Surveillance in Post-Pandemic Life Publisher

Summary: Study proposes IoT system to monitor health & enforce distancing during pandemics, reducing COVID-19 spread risk. #IoTHealth #PandemicTech

Vedaei SS¹ ; Fotovvat A¹ ; Mohebbian MR¹ ; Rahman GME¹ ; Wahid KA¹ ; Babyn P² ; Marateb HR³ ; Mansourian M⁴ ; Sami R⁵
Source: IEEE Access Published:2020

Abstract

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic with no designated cure or vaccine, the only way to break the infection chain is self-isolation and maintaining the physical distancing. In this article, we present a potential application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare and physical distance monitoring for pandemic situations. The proposed framework consists of three parts: A lightweight and lowcost IoT node, a smartphone application (app), and fog-based Machine Learning (ML) tools for data analysis and diagnosis. The IoT node tracks health parameters, including body temperature, cough rate, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen saturation, then updates the smartphone app to display the user health conditions. The app notifies the user to maintain a physical distance of 2 m (or 6 ft), which is a key factor in controlling virus spread. In addition, a Fuzzy Mamdani system (running at the fog server) considers the environmental risk and user health conditions to predict the risk of spreading infection in real time. The environmental risk conveys from the virtual zone concept and provides updated information for different places. Two scenarios are considered for the communication between the IoT node and fog server, 4G/5G/WiFi, or LoRa, which can be selected based on environmental constraints. The required energy usage and bandwidth (BW) are compared for various event scenarios. The COVID-SAFE framework can assist in minimizing the coronavirus exposure risk. © 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.