Smart healthcare support for remote patient monitoring during covid-19 quarantine.

Abstract

Social distancing and quarantining are now standard practices which are implemented worldwide since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic in 2019. Due to the full acceptance of the above control practices, frequent hospital contact visits are being discouraged. However, there are people whose physiological vital needs still require routine monitoring for improved healthy living. Interestingly, with the recent technological advancements in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, smart home automation, and healthcare systems, contact-based hospital visits are now regarded as non-obligatory. To this end, a remote smart home healthcare support system (ShHeS) is proposed for monitoring patients' health status and receiving doctors’ prescriptions while staying at home. Besides this, doctors can also carry out the diagnosis of ailments using the data collected remotely from the patient. An Android based mobile application that interfaces with a web-based application is implemented for efficient patients-doctors dual real-time communication. Sensors are incorporated in the system for automatic capturing of physiological health parameters of patients. Also, a hyperspace analogue to context (HAC) was incorporated into the current monitoring framework for service discovery and context change in the home environment towards accurate readings of the physiological parameters and improved system performance. With the proposed system, patients can be remotely monitored from their homes, and can also live a more comfortable life through the use of some features of smart home automation devices on their phones. Therefore, one main significant contribution of this study is that patients in self-isolation or self-quarantine can use the new platform to send daily health symptoms and challenges to doctors via their mobile phones. Thus, improved healthy living and a comfortable lifestyle can still be achieved even during such a problematic period of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic that has already recorded 20,026,186 million cases so far with 734,020 thousand deaths globally.