Published Paper Details:

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic with no designated cure or vaccine, the only way to break the infection chain is self-isolation and maintaining the physical distancing. In this article, we present a potential application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare and physical distance monitoring for pandemic situations. The proposed framework consists of three parts: a lightweight and low cost IoT node, a smartphone application (app), and fog-based Machine Learning (ML) tools for data analysis and diagnosis. The IoT node tracks health parameters, including body temperature, cough rate, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen saturation, and then updates the smartphone app to display the user health conditions. The environmental risk conveys from the virtual zone concept and provides updated information for different places. Two scenarios are considered for the communication between the IoT node and fog server, 4G/5G/Wi-Fi, or LoRa, which can be selected based on environmental constraints. The required energy usage and bandwidth (BW) are compared for various event scenarios. The COVID-SAFE framework can assist in minimizing the coronavirus exposure risk.