A Blockchain-Based Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Contagious Pandemic Situation Supervision Scheme Using Internet of Drone Things

Contagious disease pandemics present a significant threat worldwide in terms of both human health and economic damage. New diseases emerge annually and place enormous burdens on many countries. Additionally, using humans to handle pandemic situations increases the chances of disease spreading. Therefore, various technologies that do not directly involve humans should be employed to handle pandemic situations. The Internet of Drones (IoDT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain are emerging technologies that have revolutionized the modern world. This article presents a blockchain-based AI-empowered pandemic situation supervision scheme in which a swarm of drones embedded with AI is engaged to autonomously monitor pandemic outbreaks, thereby keeping human involvement as low as possible. A use case based on a recent pandemic (i.e., COVID-19) is discussed. Two types of drone swarms are used to handle multiple tasks (e.g., checking face masks and imposing lockdowns). A lightweight blockchain is considered to handle situations in remote areas with poor network connectivity. Additionally, a two-phase lightweight security mechanism is adopted to validate the entities in the proposed scheme. A proof of concept is established using an experimental environment setup and dataset training. An analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed scheme.