A space-based healthcare emergency management system for epidemics monitoring and response

A global pandemic such as COVID-19 highlights more than anything else the necessity of a robust technological infrastructure to support critical activities, digital healthcare services, hospital organizations, medical screening and first aid facilities. The aim of the proposed solution is to provide an advanced healthcare monitoring and management system, covering national and international territory, exploiting spatial assets. The system includes all the innovative elements to provide an efficient monitoring and management solution for fighting against wide epidemics. Medical screening kiosks, healthcare VANs, IoT sensors, hybrid communication system (both satellite and terrestrial), centralized cloud-based data centre, provide a large healthcare screening and response network on the whole population which allows to help hospitals, medical and first aid units, rescue & military teams in pre-triage screening/prevention, monitoring and logistics activities for epidemics. The solution provides for the use of an infrastructure based on a Telespazio Hybrid Network implementing resilient high-capacity virtual connections by combining a multiplicity of physical connections based on different technologies that operate simultaneously ensuring robustness of the connection, continuity and quality of service. Finally, the architecture of the proposed system will be presented by describing the main components relying on innovative IoT sensing technologies, processing and response concepts.