The Role of Emerging Technologies to Fight Against COVID-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Review

Abstract

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.

Keywords: AI; COVID-19; Drone; IoMT; IoT; Pandemic.

Fig. 1

Significant role IoT towards COVID-19 pandemic

Fig. 2

Plan of systematic literature review (SLR), number indicates the research articles selected in respected category

Fig. 3

IoT-based framework for COVID-19 infection detection and monitoring

Fig. 4

Doctors consulting through virtual meetings APPs in hospitals

Fig. 5

Virtual conference room

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Social distance detector App

Fig. 7

GIS technology helps to identify a high risk infected zone

Fig. 8

GPS and bluetooth help for maintaining social distances

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Smart thermometer

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AWS IoT-Button

Fig. 11

Different kind of drones to manage the impact of COVID-19

Fig. 12

Robot as an essential workers in COVID-19

Fig. 13

Maintaining social distances using TraceTogether Apps

Fig. 14

Joint Google Apple contact tracing Apps for social distance maintaining and alerting system