Innovative IoT Solutions to address COVID-19 challenges
COVID 19 has strongly influenced the Government and private corporations on how they continue to thrive and grow in the current market. In this article, we will focus on Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and how it can address some of these challenges that are timely in the event of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will look at two practical relevant examples in the field of Healthcare amidst this pandemic and show the use of IoT technology in this current context.
Medical Asset Tracking
Last month New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took a decision to merge all the 200 New York hospitals into one healthcare system. With this consolidation, there are now 53,000 hospital beds out of which 20,000 were in New York City alone. In order to run an hospital of this scale, there are a few operational challenges which can be addressed by innovative use of technology. In a hospital environment, there are high standards of hygiene and safety. Since we are battling an infectious disease, these standards are further strict in the context of current situation. Some examples of these needs are listed below:
- Determine how often the staff is sanitizing their hands as they move through the facility.
- Determine real time location, equipment's operational health, and usage of the medical equipment. This becomes important especially when we are looking at scarce resources such as Ventilators
By using smart asset tags and IOT beacons, these usage, location, and operational health of these physical assets are monitored continuously in an automated way. These are shown in the “Things” category as Medical Devices in the below diagram. This continued monitoring enables hospitals to focus on the patient health knowing that their assets are clean and also are being leveraged effectively. The global market of hospital asset tracking is expected to generate more than $53 Billion by the year 2025 according to Zion Market Research analysis.
Smart Connected Thermometers
The healthcare product company Kinsa has a strong mission. Their mission is to stop the spread of infectious diseases and they are using the power of data and information to enable their goal. Their Smart Thermometer lets you check the temperature for a patient and these temperature trends can be checked real time across the country. This is an powerful feature when participation reaches a critical mass. For instance if you know that there is a big surge in the people impacted by a Flu virus in your neighborhood, you would take additional care even when you are not in the middle of a pandemic.
The smart phone app has useful information on symptoms, home remedy, when to contact a doctor, and also nearby pharmacies at the touch of a button. This information is timely, relevant, and actionable.
Now that we have seen these two examples, let us look at the generic architecture provided by Microsoft to build a IOT solution. This is a simplified version of the architecture shown above. This can be used as a starting point across multiple domains. For example, to monitor machines in a manufacturing plant, shipments in the case of supply chain, or smart kiosks in a retail store.
A few salient features about the architecture:
- The IoT Device Provisioning Service (DPS) provides API and automation support to plan, provision, configure, monitor, and retire sensors in a secure repeatable way.
- The Cloud Gateway supports the popular protocols such as HTTPS, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for communication. There is a support for protocol adaptation to communicate with any legacy or custom sensors that can’t understand these protocols.
- Azure Stream Analytics has support to do real time queries using Unified SQL (U-SQL), a SQL like query language.
- Azure Machine Learning provides many pre-built training models, notebooks, and drag n drop experience for you to build robust intelligence in the solution.
- Logic Apps or LOB applications can use the “insights” derived through the data. Optionally, we can include Microsoft Event Grid and have multiple sinks that can leverage the data and insights for downstream operations as shown below.
