A Comprehensive Survey on Pandemic Patient Monitoring System: Enabling Technologies, Opportunities, and Research Challenges

Abstract

Sporadic occurrences of transmissible diseases have severe and long-lasting effects on humankind throughout history. These outbreaks have molded the political, economic, and social aspects of human life. Pandemics have redefined some of the basic beliefs of modern healthcare, pushing researchers and scientists to develop innovative solutions to be better equipped for future emergencies. Numerous attempts have been made to fight Covid-19-like pandemics using technologies such as the Internet of Things, wireless body area network, blockchain, and machine learning. Since the disease is highly contagious, novel research in patients’ health monitoring system is essential for the constant monitoring of pandemic patients with minimal or no human intervention. With the ongoing pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, popularly known as Covid-19, innovations for monitoring of patients’ vitals and storing them securely have risen more than ever. Analyzing the stored patients’ data can further assist healthcare workers in their decision-making process. In this paper, we surveyed the research works on remote monitoring of pandemic patients admitted in hospitals or quarantined at home. First, an overview of pandemic patient monitoring is given followed by a brief introduction of enabling technologies i.e. Internet of Things, blockchain, and machine learning to implement the system. The reviewed works have been classified into three categories; remote monitoring of pandemic patients using IoT, blockchain-based storage or sharing platforms for patients’ data, and processing/analyzing the stored patients’ data using machine learning for prognosis and diagnosis. We also identified several open research issues to set directions for future research.

A Review of Recent Innovations in Remote Health Monitoring

“…Year Content Description of Each Survey [56] Reviewed three healthcare algorithm applications using wearable inertial sensors [57] Surveyed different encryption schemes to assure data privacy for medical cyber-physical systems [58] Overview of current remote patient monitoring systems utilized to find multiple physiological parameters [59] Overview of remote health monitoring applications in smartwatches [60] Provided low bandwidth and power sensor design for remote health monitoring systems [61] Proposed four-tier security architecture and reviewed various research works to enhance the wireless body area networks' security and privacy [62] Summarized health monitoring systems in health smart homes for dependent and elderly people [63] Proposed and surveyed diverse technologies of smart health monitoring [64] Reviewed the global navigation satellite system bridge structural health monitoring applications [65] Provided remote health monitoring application for clinical workload decreasing during the COVID pandemic [66] Investigated and overviewed multitemporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar used in infrastructure health monitoring [67] Investigated the benefit of using continuous remote patient monitoring on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients to decrease returns to the emergency department [68] Survey on IoT remote health monitoring security using different techniques [69] Overview of different resource-constrained systematic remote pedestrian localization systems [70] Overview of research works on pandemic patients' remote health monitoring systems [71] Reviewed recent reinforcement learning techniques for intelligent healthcare systems…”

Commercial roadmap of nanobiosensor development

“…Due to the drastically rising number of patients worldwide during the pandemic crisis, illness diagnosis, and monitoring have become more crucial than ever. These smart gadgets and telemedicine concepts facilitate remote disease control and communication between medical personnel and patients (Haleem et al, 2021;Omboni et al, 2022;Krishna et al, 2023).…”