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]:
- Primary screening and triage: Screening and isolation of all
suspected COVID-19 once in contact with the healthcare system to allow
for proper prevention and control actions.
- Prevention and control: Isolation prevents viral transmission
and quarantine may be at home or hospital depending on the patient’s
health status.
- Traceability and privacy: Infection could be direct or
indirect, so contact tracing is essential to identify people who may
have had exposure to a confirmed COVID-19 patient and trace all
possible contacts with keeping the patient’s privacy.
- The Proposed Platform Specifications
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.