COVID-19 is caused by virus called SARS-CoV-2, which was declared by the WHO as global pandemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a rush to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) for diagnosing, predicting, and treating infections. At present, individual technologies, AI and IoT, play important roles yet do not impact individually against the pandemic because of constraints like lack of historical data and the existence of biased, noisy, and outlier data. To overcome, balance among data privacy, public health, and human-AI-IoT interaction is must. Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) appears to be a more efficient technological solution that can play a significant role to control COVID-19. IoT devices produce huge data which are gathered and mined for actionable effects in AI. AI converts data into useful results which are utilized by IoT devices. AIoT entails AI through machine learning and decision making to IoT and renovates IoT to add data exchange and analytics to AI. In this chapter, AIoT will serve as a potential analytical tool to fight against the pandemic.
Top1. Introduction And Challenges
COVID-19, as is initially known 2019-nCoV is a disease which is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2 (Shereen et al., 2020). At first, it is detected in Wuhan, China during December 2019. This disease is declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Lupia et al., 2020) as a global pandemic, dated March 11, 2020. The COVID-19 virus is transmitted via infected respiratory droplets, and whenever there is a close contact with an infected individual. COVID-19 is a highly contagious virus that remains alive on passive objects for hours and it has no official treatment or vaccine available so far. Exponential spread of the pandemic and lakhs of death at the global level has forced many countries all over the world to force lockdown (Lockdown, 2020) and other containment measures. The cost of the pandemic for human lives and economic havoc is beyond imagination.
To prevent the harsh effects of the pandemic, several containment measures are undertaken by the worldwide governments such as lockdowns, quarantines (Quarantine, 2020), and social distancing (Social Distancing, 2020).
- •
Lockdown: Lockdown is a protocol that is usually initiated by a person in position of authority and is followed by the people during an emergency situation which means that people must stay where they are, to protect them inside their home.
- •
Quarantine: Quarantine is a separation and restriction in movement of people who are not ill but are believed to be exposed to COVID-19 infection which is intended to prevent the spread of pandemic. Suspected people are quarantined in the community-based facilities or in their homes.
- •
Social distancing: Social distancing is a non-pharmaceutical measure to thwart the outbreak of pandemic while maintaining physical distance and reducing meetings among people, in order to avoid close contact with each other. It includes a safe distance of 6 feet or 2 meters between one and other person to avoid gathering of people in large groups.
To meet the effectiveness of the measures mentioned above, several prerequisites are to be considered such as good health hygiene, regular hand cleaning, closing of schools, colleges, malls, parks and all non-essential businesses; shut down of public transports to reduce the pandemic spread. Apart from these obligations, different challenges of COVID-19 are to be handled with utmost care.
The various challenges of COVID-19 are divided into seven different categories (Figure 1). The challenges are, namely- identifying origin of pandemic (patient zero), preventing cross-infection between medical staff and patients, containing spread of the virus, quarantining potentially infected patients, treating critically ill patients, tracing origin of outbreak (local hotspots), and ensuring enough medical resources.
Figure 1. Various Challenges of COVID-19
All these challenges along with an accelerated spread of COVID-19 has resulted into severe problems in the health-care systems such as lack of adequate healthcare professionals, testing devices, ventilators, safety devices etc. (Song et al., 2020). These problems have reached to a level that governments are unable to scale up the solution in proportionate to the pandemic outbreak. Therefore, a feasible solution is the demand of time which is to be easily scalable, automated, tuned, cost efficient and lesser dependent upon the man power.