An End-to-End Smart IoT-Driven Navigation for Social Distancing Enforcement

The unprecedented global spread of the coronavirus pandemic COVID-19 has significantly promoted novel Internet-of-things (IoT)-based solutions to prevent, combat, monitor, or predict virus spread in the population. The proliferation of these technologies has fostered their utilization for different practical use-cases to offer reinforced control, discipline, and safety. This paper proposes an end-to-end smart navigation framework that uses Social IoT (SIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to ensure pedestrians’ navigation safety through a given geographical area. The aim is to mitigate the risks of exposure to the virus and impose social distancing practices while avoiding high-risk areas identified from the SIoT data. First, we create weighted graphs representing the social relations connecting the different IoT devices in the area of interest. Second, we regroup the devices into communities according to their SIoT relations that consider their locations and owners’ friendship levels. Next, we extract CCTV recorded videos to estimate the level of social distancing practice on different roads using a computer vision model. Accordingly, the road segments are assigned weights representing their safety levels based on the extracted data. Afterward, a graph-based routing algorithm is executed to recommend the route to follow while achieving a trade-off between speed and safety. Finally, the proposed framework is generalized to enable multi-user coordinated navigation. The feasibility of the proposed approach on real-world maps and IoT datasets is corroborated in our simulation results showing an ability to balance safety and travel distance, which can be adjusted according to the user’s preferences.