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Top1. Introduction
Developing and implementing operational strategies to improve sustainable performance that is achieving operational excellence in three fronts social, environmental and economic(Saroha et al., 2019; Abdullah, 2020) is the main objective of the industries these days. One such strategy is to develop information communication technology enabled intelligent process that facilitates product innovation, customized service offering and eventually access to diversified markets(Pinho & Ferreira, 2017). The organisations providing health care service are too trying to employ intelligent technologies to enhance their operational performance. Continuous advancements in technology relating to wireless technology, Internet of things and Artificial Intelligence have led to the emergence of an hyper-connected world(Ziouvelou and McGroarty, 2019) which have attracted practitioners and researchers to develop ways for the practical implementation of these technologies in health care services. The result of this integration of the intelligent technologies with health care service has observed to reap the benefits of rapid response, diagnosis as well as remote treatment and infection prevention. While some of these have barely been accepted in the past, the advent of COVID-19 has forced a lot of health practitioners to re-strategise and reform their existing operational approach such that a lot more patients can be attended in the least amount of time with maximum patient centred care while maintaining effectiveness and efficiency of service rendered.In this regards, a wide range of devices and computer aided software’s have been developed which serves as a model that replicates the functionalities of the regular equipment found in the medical centres such as deployable and wearable sensors, embedded sensors in smart devices such as phones. These technologies leverages on the adoption of Artificial intelligence of some form, Internet of things for data transmission as well as Big Data analytics at the backend of the device for a comparative analysis as well as in logically sequencing data for decision making(Ferrag, et al., 2019).
While consumers regularly use wearable technologies to monitor health and fitness related parameters, devices such as bracelets, smart phones, watched patched, head or hand bands cloths etc can be designed for a variety of functions which could collect data in a structured manner which can be easily interpreted by a medical practitioner. Advancements also include the capability of this wearable sensors to measure cardiac rhythms, biometric data etc which increases the ability of these devices to predict or diagnose some existing conditions which may be present as well as for remote patient monitoring in the case of severe conditions which needs to be monitored in real time(Purohit et al., 2020).Furthermore, a more traditional mobile health application is seen in the rapid development of the Lab on a Chip devices which is a complete variation of the sensor, processing power and connection reliant technology. This development seeks to minimise the laboratory function to the size of a disk such that accurate analysis as well as diagnosis could be done on a smaller scale through the combination of microfluidics, microelectronics and sometimes, voltametric analysis which offers point of care testing in rural environments(Azhar and Dendukuri, 2017).