Abstract
This study applied the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines to
redesign the Portable Health Clinic (PHC), as a Remote Healthcare System
(RHS), for the spread of COVID-19 containment. Additionally, the
proposed system not only collects people data but also classifies the
case according to the the main symptoms of coronavirus using the
COVID-19 triage process (CT-process) based on the analysis of
measurement readings taken from patients, where drones are used as a PHC
platform and are equipped with the required sensors and essential
COVID-19 medications for testing and treating people at their doorstep
autonomously when a full curfew is imposed.
Keywords: COVID-19, drones, remote healthcare system, portable
health clinic, full curfew.
Introduction
Coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, is an infectious illness that has been
discovered recently [1]. This virus was unknown before the Wuhan
chain occurrence in December 2019, and by April 2022 over 490 million
people globally are infected and over 6 million have died [2].
COVID-19’s most like to appear symptoms are fever, fatigue, and dry
cough. Furthermore, several patients also experienced runny noses, nasal
clog, sore throat, throbbing pain, or diarrhea [3]. Individuals get
infected by this virus through tiny beads when coughing, sniffling, or
talking during close contact [4], these beads fall to a surface or
ground making contaminations over long distances [5] with a survival
time of up to 72 hours [4]. On 11 March 2020, the WHO announced it
was a pandemic. At that point, numerous countries have imposed
nationwide lockdown, especially in COVID-19 hotspots with an aggressive
promotion of the social distancing concept in the media to raise
awareness. A hotspot is a district where reports indicate a relatively
larger number of confirmed COVID-19 infections [6]. This motivates
the idea of this paper, where populations under a curfew are being
tested for COVID-19 symptoms at their doorsteps with minimal human
intervention by using a portable health platform comprised of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
The uniqueness of the proposed approach is that the PHC platform is
fully automated and delivers the COVID-19 testing and medication
services to one’s doorstep during a full curfew. The rest of the paper
is organized as follows; Section 2 presents related work, while section
3 compares traditional and drone-based COVID-19 data collection, and the
design methodology is explained in section 4. The redesigned PHC system
is discussed in section 5, then the discussion and comparison with other
works are mentioned in section 6. Finally, conclusions are brought in
section 7.
Related Work
After the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT),
Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems received great acknowledgment
from healthcare application developers [7] as a highly feasible
alternative for COVID-19 control. IoT technologies offer a variety of
services in such a contagious environment, e.g. telemedicine services,
diagnosing coronavirus patients, tracking the coronavirus contamination
pattern, and combining these services with wearable devices [8].
Drones, as carrying platforms of IoT payload can be utilized [9, 10]
and most developed countries support the drone-based approach because it
offers a safe way to help humanity [11]. Tracking the time scale of
COVID-19 events with research efforts; one of the earliest applications
studied and adopted to combat the COVID-19 pandemic was the delivery of
life-saving medicine [12], followed by research on public monitoring
[9] and data gathering [13] respectively. Thereafter, spreading
disinfection on hot-spot surfaces was suggested by research. Finally,
offering communication coverage was also an area for investigation by
researchers.
For delivery missions, in [14] drones capability of drones for
distributing viral tests to possibly infected patients using existing
drone infrastructure is investigated. Furthermore, an automated
drone-based food and parcels delivery for residents during curfews is
considered in [12]. Delivering life-saving medicines in faraway
hospitals using drones is investigated in [15]. Also, an automatic
COVID-19 emergency response system to deliver supplies at low
transportation cost based on a combination of blockchain and a multi-UAV
network is proposed in [16].
For surveillance and public statements, in [17] drones fly over a
congested area for social distance monitoring. Additionally, in [18]
UAVs with equipped surveillance cameras and loudspeakers are used to
inform people about the guidelines in case of emergency. Moreover in
India, a drone-based system is used for monitoring social distancing and
telling individuals the right way to wear a mask [11], similar to
[9], where a preprogrammed flight route UAV is utilized for mass
monitoring and quarantine zones reinforcement, and the operator is
notified if social distancing regulations are not followed.
UAVs can participate in data gathering during COVID-19, wherein [13]
an Arduino-based drone with mounted optical and thermal cameras is built
to collect people’s temperature and face information and transmit live
video to a smartphone located inside Virtual Reality (VR) glasses worn
by the pilot. Another study investigates what so-called pandemic drones,
which are remotely steered aircraft systems created by a Canadian
aircraft manufacturing company named Draganfly, are used to improve
emergency response time, health status monitoring, and infectious and
respiratory issues detection [19]. Also, in [11] drone’s
real-time data gathering process from wearable sensors, movement
sensors, cameras, and thermal scanners is discussed, where UAV is
considered as an edge intelligence to process data and avoid collisions.
Showering of disinfectants is another area where UAVs can participate
similar to sprinkling pesticides in agriculture [18]. In [19],
South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SMDC) in India deployed drones to
sanitize COVID-19 hotspots by spraying a disinfectant containing 1%
sodium hypochlorite solution. Also, a simulation study in [6]
considers statistics about drones for outdoor sanitization with
variations in the number of drones, periods, and the percentage of
individual drone utilization. While in [20] a real drone is used
with a disinfecting tank for sanitizing indoor and outdoor environments
as needed.
Drones can be used for providing communication coverage, as in [21]
UAVs are used to offer reliable communication links establishment and
maintenance between certain ground vehicles. Similarly in [17], UAVs
are utilized as message relays in the vehicle-to-vehicle communication
architecture during COVID-19 lockdown so the health status of passengers
can be delivered steadily to the health workforce, and in the event of
an accident, drones arrive nearby and gather information from close
vehicles. Furthermore, a hybrid vehicle delivery system is proposed in
[18] that uses both ground vehicles and UAVs for delivery during the
COVID-19 pandemic, and the vehicles collaborate by organizing and
maintaining stable communication links.
Additionally, a mixture of services can be provided by drones during the
COVID-19 outbreak, as in [22] where UAVs offer multiple services
like testing, contact tracing, sanitization, protocol enforcements, and
spread analysis. Also in [11], a UAV-based healthcare system
architecture that suits several COVID-19 handling situations is proposed
and is applied in both real-time and simulation-based scenarios
providing surveillance, announcement, live video communication,
sanitization, thermal image capturing, and patient identification (ID)
for large areas.
All the COVID-19 combating drone-based system applications and case
studies reviewed in this paper and several other similar papers
highlight the fact that the possibility of using UAVs in the healthcare
sector could reduce response time effectively and overcome natural
restrictions. However, the problem statement, medical professionals,
patients, database, way of communication, and drone manufacturers should
be considered in designing such systems.
COVID-19 Data Collection: Traditional vs. Drone-based Methods