Telehealth System for Effective Treatment in COVID-19 Pandemics

1: Introduction

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute infectious respiratory disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). The COVID-19 disease affects a respiratory system starting with the ordinary cold and it develops into serious infection like pneumonia as (WHO 2020). The spread of this virus is mainly by droplets of an infected person (Hong, Hao 2020). The governments of various countries are trying their level best to reduce the spread of this virus by using strict lockdown, social distancing, use of masks and personal protective equipments. The lockdown restricts the common people to move around but the necessary medical facilities must be continued to control the spread of the coronavirus epidemic.

All the countries are working on finding a convenient and commercial solution to face the problem of demand and supply of medical facilities to COVID-19 affected patients. The current situation in most countries during this pandemics is a lack of beds in the hospitals. The hospitals are full of COVID19 patients and no more patients can be admitted. Nowadays hospitals are instructing patients to stay at home for the treatment. The patients who have mild to moderate symptoms are therefore sent back to home with proper instructions from medical staff like home quarantine, isolation and medicines. This leads to providing medical facilities to COVID-19 patients at their home. It also frees up the scare resources at the Hospital like ICU beds and ventilators.

This emergency has presented healthcare delivery systems exceptional challenges to monitor and get feedback from such home quarantined patients. This situation has forced the medical system to implement telehealth and altered healthcare delivery at an overwhelming speed (Augenstein J 2020). The telehealth system allows treatments and monitoring without direct or physical contact with the coronavirus affected people (Galewitz P). This ensures the physical social distancing as the affected people are not required to visit hospitals. This helps in reducing spread of the coronavirus (Hollander 2020). Telehealth therefore provides the supply of medical facilities across geographical boundaries. This also reduces the cost and need of personal protective equipment required for medical staff, and gives isolated patients connection with medical staff, and their families and friends (Keesara 2020).

The implementation of suitable telehealth for the current COVID 19 pandemics is a big challenge for the researchers. The telehealth system must be implemented with minimal requirement of the resources and equipment. The implemented system should be cost effective, easy to use by both the patient and medical staff. The telehealth system for the current situation must need to utilise the well adequate and organised facilities offered from the available methodologies. The immediate implementation of the telehealth system for Covid 19 pandemic suggests the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology (Javaid 2020).

The IoT technology uses the interconnected network for the useful communication of data. The typical IoT system consists of sensors which sense the parameters and send the sensed information through some communication technology to the server or processing unit. The processing unit performs the analysis on the received information and replies back the processed data in the required format to the concerned process. There are many applications implemented data in the required format to the concerned process. There are many applications implemented using IoT in many domains including healthcare too. The use of IoT in healthcare or medicine is referred to as Internet of Medicine Things (ToMT) or Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) (Allam 2020).