Internet of Things for Current COVID-19 and Future Pandemics: an Exploratory Study

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained convincing research ground as a new research topic in a wide variety of academic and industrial disciplines, especially in healthcare. The IoT revolution is reshaping modern healthcare systems by incorporating technological, economic, and social prospects. It is evolving healthcare systems from conventional to more personalized healthcare systems through which patients can be diagnosed, treated, and monitored more easily. The current global challenge of the pandemic caused by the novel severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 presents the greatest global public health crisis since the pandemic influenza outbreak of 1918. At the time this paper was written, the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases around the world had reached more than 31 million. Since the pandemic started, there has been a rapid effort in different research communities to exploit a wide variety of technologies to combat this worldwide threat, and IoT technology is one of the pioneers in this area. In the context of COVID-19, IoT-enabled/linked devices/applications are utilized to lower the possible spread of COVID-19 to others by early diagnosis, monitoring patients, and practicing defined protocols after patient recovery. This paper surveys the role of IoT-based technologies in COVID-19 and reviews the state-of-the-art architectures, platforms, applications, and industrial IoT-based solutions combating COVID-19 in three main phases, including early diagnosis, quarantine time, and after recovery.