Pervasive Communications Technologies For Managing Pandemics

Pandemics always have had serious consequences unless they were effectively contained. Recent experiences with COVID-19 show that by using a smart and swift approach to deal with pandemics, avoids overwhelming of healthcare systems, and reduces loss of precious life. This paper is about using smart technologies such as Mobile Edge Clouds (MEC), Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), as an approach to effectively manage pandemics. IoT provides pervasive connectivity among various devices and can be used for collecting information such as location and symptoms of potentially infected individuals. MECs provide cloud services on the edge, integrating IoT infrastructure and execution of sophisticated AI algorithms in the Cloud. In this paper, we develop a prototype to demonstrate the convergence of pervasive technologies to support research in managing pandemics. Low-cost Single Board Computers (SBC) based clusters are integrated within MEC to support remote medical teams in the field. The prototype implements a lightweight Docker container orchestrated by Kubernetes eco-system which is deployed on the clusters. The prototype successfully demonstrates that mobile medical facilities can utilize the proposed solution to collect information and execute AI algorithms while on the go. Finally, we present a discussion on the role of converging pervasive technologies on managing pandemics.