IoT Platform for COVID-19 Prevention and Control: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey explores how IoT platforms, especially fog-cloud systems, can support comprehensive COVID-19 prevention and control through symptom diagnosis, quarantine, contact tracing, forecasting, and mutation tracking.

Contribution

It reviews state-of-the-art IoT interventions for COVID-19 and proposes a fog-cloud based platform for systematic epidemic management.

Findings

IoT enhances epidemic monitoring and control capabilities.

Fog-cloud architecture supports real-time COVID-19 interventions.

The survey identifies key IoT applications for future infectious disease management.

Abstract

As a result of the worldwide transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has evolved into an unprecedented pandemic. Currently, with unavailable pharmaceutical treatments and vaccines, this novel coronavirus results in a great impact on public health, human society, and global economy, which is likely to last for many years. One of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that a long-term system with non-pharmaceutical interventions for preventing and controlling new infectious diseases is desirable to be implemented. Internet of things (IoT) platform is preferred to be utilized to achieve this goal, due to its ubiquitous sensing ability and seamless connectivity. IoT technology is changing our lives through smart healthcare, smart home, and smart city, which aims to build a more convenient and intelligent community. This paper presents how the IoT could be incorporated into the epidemic prevention and control system. Specifically, we demonstrate a potential fog-cloud combined IoT platform that can be used in the systematic and intelligent COVID-19 prevention and control, which involves five interventions including COVID-19 Symptom Diagnosis, Quarantine Monitoring, Contact Tracing & Social Distancing, COVID-19 Outbreak Forecasting, and SARS-CoV-2 Mutation Tracking. We investigate and review the state-of-the-art literatures of these five interventions to present the capabilities of IoT in countering against the current COVID-19 pandemic or future infectious disease epidemics.