AI and IoT-assisted Healthcare Practices for Smart Management During Global Pandemics

Pandemics are disasters that create havoc on the entire planet by spreading infectious diseases at an unprecedented rate. Recently, the Covid-19 virus has caused massive levels of devastation throughout the world, with an exponential rise in the number of cases and the death toll. With this, a wave of “life fear” spread among the people across the countries that had disturbed the entire medical community. The current healthcare system around the world was confronted with the potential issue of not having enough resources to help many patients at once, which resulted in mental strain among healthcare professionals and the general public. Thus, various research institutions and organizations scrambled to find technological solutions to the virus's problems and a vaccine or other medication to stop its spread. Computational technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, big data, blockchain, robots, drones, etc. are the various advancements that can easily inhibit the growth of this disease, ascertain critical patients, and assist in real-time contagion control. Therefore, in this study, the emphasis is on the artificial intelligence and Internet of things-powered technologies that can be used for covid detection and further diagnosis in five phases, starting with symptom detection, testing, diagnosis of home quarantine patients, treatment of hospitalized patients, and the post-covid recovery of the patients. Therefore, it is imperative to take lessons from the current pandemic and prepare for pandemics similar to Covid- 19 in the future.

I. Introduction

In the course of human history, there existed very few events that had such potential to shape the nations and their citizens across the globe in a negative way. One of those has been the rapid spread of infectious diseases which turned out into a pandemic [1]. Recently, the world has witnessed the first, second, and third waves of the Covid-19 pandemic which has shattered the lives of millions of people across the world. Cases of a novel coronavirus, also known as Covid- 19, were first observed in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and led to affecting the entire world economically, socially, personally, mentally as well as physically. The Covid-19 pandemic spread so broadly and seized lives at such a startling rate that the World Health Organization (WHO) had to declare it a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 [2]. All over the globe, this resulted in the closure of corporations, higher educational institutions, and organizations which urged the demand for more technological innovations across all sectors. As of today, there have been 685,330,069 coronavirus cases recorded worldwide, resulting in 6,840,367 deaths and 658,097,434 recoveries [3].