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An AI-Assisted IoT-Based Framework for Time Efficient Health Monitoring of COVID-19 Patients
Published in Bhawana Rudra, Anshul Verma, Shekhar Verma, Bhanu Shrestha, Futuristic Research Trends and Applications of Internet of Things, 2022
Punitkumar Bhavsar, Vinal Patel
The health sector is at the greatest crisis due to this global pandemic. Ever increase in the demand of medical resources such as ventilators, medical masks, sanitizers and medicines has impacted the supply chain. Apart from pertinent commodities, the surging demand of additional medical staff is another challenge to cope with. Developing countries are already deprived of the availability of doctors, which is less than the standard ratio 1000:1 (population to doctor proportion) as suggested by WHO (Campbell et al., 2013). The statistics reveal over 45% of the member countries of WHO reports less than 1 doctor per 1000 population (Campbell et al., 2013). Only 11 out of 28 states in India meet the WHO recommendations. This shortage exacerbates when the doctors in small hospitals and clinics with limited nursing facilities are not able to treat the COVID-19 patient due to increased likelihood of getting the infection or not having enough resource and infrastructure to avoid the spread. It has created further shortage of medical staff and personnel available for the treatment. The available doctors find it difficult to properly allocate their time to treat an increasing number of patients. In such a time, smart technology with mobile devices and artificial intelligence can help doctors to allocate their time and attention efficiently. The government of India has released ‘Aarogya Setu’, a mobile application that tracks the real-time location of COVID-19 patients and provides information about the risk of exposure to other users in order to prevent the spreading of infection. This mobile application also provides self-assessment tests to check the status of their risk level by answering a few MCQ based questionnaires. Similarly, Singapore’s health ministry advised the citizens to use ‘TraceTogether’ mobile application that traces the people who were exposed to infected patients within the last 21 days (Wei et al., 2020). If a person is found infected, the application provides information about people who had close contact with the patient. Germany, in order to control the spread of the disease after relieving the restrictions, launched ‘Corona-warn-app’ that warns the users if they have been in the vicinity of infected individuals (Reelfs et al., 2020). These mobile applications support in containing the spread of the disease by raising an alert at the right time. Though such mobile applications potentially reduce the time compared to manual tracing of a contact, their usage provoked global debate on jeopardization of privacy of users (Darbyshire, 2020). Though the recovery rate for COVID-19 is approximated to around 98% as declared by the WHO, the exponentially increased number of patients increases the number of deaths on a daily basis. Initially, patients feel mild symptoms which are overlapping with other flu conditions hence in the absence of proper awareness they may turn into moderate ones. The moderate symptoms, if not treated in time, may turn into severe ones which have to be managed and monitored under the supervision from a medical practitioner. However, the shortage of medical staffing and resources, it becomes difficult for the doctor to properly allocate their time to the serious patients.
Factors affecting user experience of contact tracing app during COVID-19: an aspect-based sentiment analysis of user-generated review
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2023
Satya Bhusan Dash, Avinash Jain, Lipika Dey, Tirthankar Dasgupta, Abir Naskar
Aarogya Setu is a mobile application developed by the Indian government to connect essential health services with Indian citizens in their combined fight against COVID-19. The application enables people to self-assess their risk of getting COVID-19. It uses the phone’s Bluetooth, location, and mobile number to check whether the user has interacted with a potentially COVID-19-positive individual. It also offers crucial information, such as the locations of COVID-19 help centres and a self-assessment test, which checks whether the individual has had a chance to contact COVID-19 unknowingly. The app surpassed 8 million downloads within three days of its release. It beat the Zoom video meeting app to become the most popular free app for both Androids and iPhones (“Coronavirus app Aarogya Setu” 2020) and reached 50 million users in just 13 days – a global record for an application (“India’s Aarogya Setu becomes” 2020).