Internet of Things and Web Services for Handling Pandemic Challenges

Abstract

Within the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted millions of lives and caused unforeseen economic damage, whose impact is both significant and far-reaching. There is an immediate need to utilize emerging technologies across various industries to fight the pandemic in this light. Internet of Things (IoT) and Web Services (Cloud services) are two such technologies that provide promising solutions to combat the virus outbreak. To monitor, track, and control the spread of viruses during the pandemic, IoT and similar sensor-based technologies have been employed. Innovative technologies that enable monitoring of health delivers live observation by using smart devices to monitor the health and can handle remotely with support of cloud and Artificial Intelligence. The HMS establishes a secure remote monitoring system between patients and doctors, facilitating telehealth services to be rendered. For tracking, the HMS uses a combination of personal health data and social data in real-time, enabled through technologies such as Machine Learning, distributed Cloud computing, and AI-based speech recognition. Because of lightweight Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and edge computing capacity, the IoT-enabled HMS is now accessible through mobile apps and web-based applications. Web services are playing an integral role in Industry’s response to fight the global pandemic. To access the data on the COVID-19 provided by World Health Organization a separate interface is provided over a web service. Some other RESTful APIs to track COVID-19 include: CORD-19, deployed on Vespa Cloud, that enables search and navigation on Open Research Dataset; CoronaTab that provides localized health information; COVID-19 India API sourced from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare that retrieves case counts, testing statistics and hospital data from the Indian subcontinent. Cloud-based services are employed to support remote work-from-home operations, e-commerce, retail, healthcare, and entertainment segments, to name a few. Enterprises effectively use cloud services to build robust and disaster-averse networks worldwide to respond to a distributed workforce and protect data and business applications’ integrity. Another sector is the energy and utility verticals, which uses IT service management (PaaS and SaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS) for digital transformation during this pandemic. This chapter discusses how IoT and Web services support handling global COVID-19 challenges, especially in Healthcare, retail, and social sectors.