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