In [14], the authors mention a traditional COVID-19 data collection approach named Vehicle-Based Testing (VBT) used by the state Red Cross Organization, this approach could be briefly compared to our suggested drone-based approach in Table 1.
Table 1: Traditional vs drone-based COVID-19 data collection approaches.
Design Methodology
WHO guidelines for combating COVID-19 are followed in this study as a theoretical basis of the designed PHC system to meet the general requirements in the service, which include [23-25]:
Many researchers have adopted a commercial multi-rotor UAV as a platform, which is the DJI
Phantom Pro v2, for different applications [26-29] and hence it has been selected in this research. A network of autonomous commercially available DJI Phantom Pro v2 quadcopter drones creates a swarm consisting of one Leader Drone (LD) and many Slave Drones (SDs), specifications are illustrated in Table 2 [30]. It is also assumed that each drone has two IoT Wi-Fi modules to control the drone flight and enable network capability as in [31]. SDs can communicate with the LD as well as transmit, receive and react to flight control codes to implement any required flight plan. Additionally, the Fifth Generation of cellular networks (5G) is used by the LD as in [8] for long communications i.e. with the base station. Therefore, the LD needs to be more powerful and durable than other SDs so it is assumed to have a double battery capacity, which can be done by soldering another battery in parallel to the existing one.