IoT-based e-Health Framework for COVID-19 Patients Monitoring

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, produced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has caused global public health emergency, with the rapid evolution and tragic consequences. The fight against this disease, whose epidemiological, clinical, and prognostic characteristics are still being studied in recent works which is forcing a change in the form of care, to include transforming some face-to-face consultations into non-face-to-face. Recently, various initiatives have emerged to incorporate the Internet of Things (IoT) in different sectors specially the health sector generally and in e-Health systems specifically. Millions of devices are connected and generating massive amounts of data. In this sense, based on the experience in the health sector in the management of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, it has been determined that monitoring potential patients of COVID-19 is still a great challenge for the latest technologies. In this paper, an IoT-based monitoring framework is proposed to help the health caregivers to obtain useful information during the current pandemic of COVID-19, thus bringing direct benefits of monitoring patient's health and speed of hospital care and cost reduction. An analysis of the proposed framework was carried out and a prototype system was developed and evaluated. Moreover, we evaluated the efficacy of the proposed framework to detect potentially serious cases of COVID-19 among patients treated in home isolation.