Applicability of Distributed IoT-powered Triage Units in the Management of Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries: The COVID-19 case

Abstract

Medical pandemics disrupt human activities and threaten the existence of man. Oftentimes, health care delivery services and personnel become overwhelmed by health interventions in the context of pandemics. Currently, the COVID-19 respiratory health pandemic has troubled the world economy. This paper presents the Phase One of a health care delivery architecture based on the Internet of Things $(\mathbf{IoT})$ technology. The architecture proposed herein comprises of three layers: physical, communication and cloud. The architecture considered the peculiarity of developing countries like Nigeria, where there is inadequate electricity and limited communication bandwidth with poor Quality of Services $(\mathbf{QoS})$ of the Internet. The $\mathbf{IoT}$ triage architectural model developed in this work aims to address priority on assignment of the limited health facilities such as bed spaces, ventilators, medical professionals, etc., based on comparative analytics on vital health signals updates from $\mathbf{IoT}$ devices of patients. In this work, much emphasis is placed on the physical layer of the architecture. By this, a use case diagram for the physical triage outfit is developed in addition to the architecture. It is expected that the proper implementation of this architecture in health care delivery services across the globe will go a long in managing and minimizing the effects of pandemics like the COVID-19.