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The Role of Emerging Technologies to Fight Against COVID-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Review
- Since the end of the year 2019, the whole world is experiencing a global emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The major sectors including industry, economics, education have been affected. Ongoing pandemics confined us to avoid mass gathering and rigorously maintain social distancing to mitigate the spreading of this infectious disease. In this situation emerging technologies including the internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a very important role in various fields such as healthcare, economics, educational system, and others to monitoring or tackle the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. Several papers discussed the impact of IoT on the COVID-19 pandemic in various aspects. However, the challenges and designing issues towards the implementation of IoT-based monitoring systems are not deeply investigated. Alongside, the adaptation of IoT and other technologies in the post-covid situation is not addressed properly. Our review article provides an up to date extensive survey on how IoT-enabled technologies are helping to combat the pandemic and to manage industry, education, economic, and medical system. As result, the realization is that IoT and other associated technologies have a great impact on virus detection, tracking, and mitigate the spread. In the face of an expeditiously spreading pandemic, the associated designing issues of the IoT-based framework have been looked into as a part of this review. Alongside, this review highlights the major challenges like privacy, security scalability, etc. facing in using such technologies. Finally, we explore ’The New Normal’ and the use of technologies to help in the post-pandemic era.
- In December 2019, a novel strain of the coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in the outbreak of respiratory illness (known as COVID-19 acronym for Coronavirus Disease-2019) was first originated from Wuhan city in China’s Hubei (Zhu et al. 2020; Backer et al. 2020). Like other influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2 attacks the respiratory system which causes cough, fever, breathlessness, fatigue, etc. As because the exact source of the SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, based on the genome sequence it is determined to be a family member of the genera coronavirus (Cascella et al. 2020; Afelt et al. 2018). The virus has now spread to over 213 countries and territories across the globe and was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 (Gallagher et al. 2020). The world is now struggling to dominate the unprecedented spread of this infectious disease. To limit the damage of COVID-19 unprecedented public health actions are introduced, including social distancing, travel restrictions, and quarantine (Hao 2020; Haleem et al. 2020). To impose social distancing the ‘lock-down’ process is initiated all over the world by refraining from doing what is inherently human. This lock-down means confining millions of citizens to their homes, shutting down businesses, and ceasing almost all economic activity. Across all economic sectors, the workforce has reduced that causes less production. Schools and Colleges have been closed down, and needs for commodities and manufactured products have decreased (Whiteside 2020). Additionally, this pandemic has been left several hospitals in uncertainty, having reached their utmost capacity. Consequently, it leads to a global economy, health, and educational crisis. In this crucial situation, the top priority is to mitigate the transmission of diseases by maintaining social distancing precautions (Richardson 2020). To fight against the pandemic we need to handle this crisis strongly by resuming all systems but maintaining social distance. These challenges motivate the researchers of different fields to contribute to rebuilding our global system. Moreover, all the worldwide activities including business, education, health are becoming heavily dependent on technologies. As a consequence, various countries have started to adopt digital technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (Allam and Jones 2020), Fog/Edge Computing (Azimi et al. 2017; Jorge et al. 2020) and others to combat the global crisis and to minimize the risk of community transmission. The constant monitoring of the viral infection, quick diagnosis, treatment, observing the mass gathering and the containment zone, contact tracing, helping the medical doctors and nurses, enabling telemedicine (Marr 2020a), providing e-learning all of these requirements strongly relies on the availability of wireless communications (Saeed et al. 2020).