A Proposed Approach for Building a SARS-COV-2 Watch in the IoT Network

Introduction

The Covid-19 crisis has upended our healthcare systems and forced most states to rethink how they operate. Faced with saturated hospitals and emergency departments in the midst of the health crisis, telemedicine has seen a sudden interest and small success (Chakkarwar, & Tamane, 2020; Mnaoui, Najoua, & Ouajji, 2020). Indeed, several months before the health crisis and the containment measures, consultations via telemedicine, i.e. an appointment with a doctor by videoconference, represented a very marginal percentage of medical consultations. Patients preferred to travel to their doctor's office even though remote medical consultations are reimbursed by the Health Insurance (Chen, 2021; Harris, 2020). However, the health crisis has completely changed the situation. Indeed, the containment measures, the recommendations of social distancing and the overloaded hospitals encouraged the French to resort more and more to remote consultations to prevent the risks of contamination, to allow to target more quickly the patients “at risk” and to avoid the faster circulation of the virus. (Crisostomo, Balida, & Gustilo, 2020) Connected health devices such as watches, thermometers or glucose meters are not the only levers of action for connected medicine (Garg, & Dave, 2019; Hindrayani, Fakhruddin, Prismahardi Aji, & Safitri, 2020). In fact, some more infected countries have implemented additional technologies to help health services and patients fight the Coronavirus pandemic. For example, the city of Wuhan, the first Covid-19 cluster, has implemented connected robots to distribute medicines to infected patients, helping to limit the circulation of the virus in the territory (Gawade, & Joshi, 2020; Hameed, 2021; Muladi, et al., 2020).

New technologies related to medicine and health and their development can significantly improve patient management, monitoring and treatment of diseases (Gupta & Johari, 2019; Khant, & Patel 2021; Qjidaa, et al. 2020). The Internet of Things (IOT) is one of the most used technologies to solve the problem of distance between people existing in the same place (Miladinovic, & Schefer-Wenzl, 2018; Rahim, & Iqbal, 2020).

The IoT network is used to provide an object with connectivity to the Internet to allow the feedback of information. Different communication protocols are available on the market to do this. Not all of them have the same characteristics. For companies that are getting into IoT, choosing the most suitable communication network for their uses can thus become a Chinese puzzle. They have to take into account the network coverage, the battery life of the objects, the communication distance or the service cost. Connected objects allow for real-time and on-demand tracking and identification of tools, equipment and medications. Being able to have instant information about a patient can often be decisive. IOT applications allow the user to interact with others to maintain and build relationships. For example, connected objects could automatically trigger messages to our friends to let them know what we are doing and where we are. There are also some IOT systems allowing an operator or a user to report a malfunction. If it is interesting at the end of an airport service to ask a user his level of satisfaction, it is even more useful for the improvement of the service, to allow to signal a lack of soap, paper, or a problem of smell (Saini, 2019; Saini, Agarwal, Varshney, & Gupta, 2018; Soumya, Shanmugam, Saini, & Kumar, 2020; Kumari, & Saini, 2021).