The Role of AI, IoT and Blockchain in Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19

 In Wuhan China, the world’s most dangerous virus is discovered, which is named COVID-19 by World Health Organization. Social distancing is one of the powerful methods to control this virus as it is realized that lockdown is not a permanent solution. This research chapter aims to identify the major activities influencing the transmission of the coronavirus spread using Artificial Intelligence bound models. To conduct this research in the right direction, movement control restriction, meteorological parameters, and air pollution levels information are collected from various valid websites. End-to-end data pre-processing steps are carried out in detail to handle the outliers and missing values and investigate the correlation between dependent and independent variables. Multiple linear regression, neural networks, decision trees, and random forests are chosen to fulfil the objective of this research by identifying the most influential activities and other parameters. Here, the model’s performance evaluation is done using the R2 value, mean absolute error and mean squared error. The predicted values are plotted against the actual value to illustrate the error patterns. Among all models, random forest and decision tree models are proven to give the highest accuracy of 93 percent and 91 percent respectively. Prescriptive analysis has been further analyzed by performing feature importance extraction from the highly accurate models to identify the most impactful parameters the government authority and healthcare front-liners focus on to mitigate the number of COVID-19 cases daily.

The disease caused by a virus known as the novel Coronavirus, also known as “COVID-19” by the public, was classified as a major epidemic by the World Health Organisation in 2019. Each country across the globe is affected by COVID-19. While writing this, over 150 million people were affected by the fast-spreading deadly pandemic, and over 3.5 million deaths due to COVID-19 were reported worldwide as per WHO’s official COVID-19 dash panel-https://covid19.who.int/Economy and social life of no territory on earth was left unaffected by the COVID-19. Now vaccines are ready, it may take a reasonable amount of time to complete the vaccination process. One major challenge was the need for more support equipment like Beds, Oxygen Cylinders, and Ventilators. Improvisation in the mass production of many critical components, especially those supporting 3D printing technology, has shown some well-managed results in handling the shortage of many critical components. This chapter examines and describes how 3D printing technologies were used during the dangerous pandemic. It aims to describe many 3D-printed devices like face masks, face shields, various valves, etc. It also makes an effort to point out the dominant drawbacks of additive manufacturing technology in this area and examines the options for a future pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a current global threat that surpasses provincial and radical boundaries. Due to the onset of the pandemic disease, the whole world turned entirely in a couple of weeks. Its consequences have come across the personal and professional life of human beings. The current situation focuses on precautions such as wearing a mask, maintaining social distancing, and sanitizing hands regularly. An innovative platform, and smart and effective IoT technology may be applied to follow these steps. This platform fulfills all critical challenges at the time of lockdown situations. IoT technology is more helpful in capturing real-time patient data and other essential information. IoT allows the tracing of infected people and suspicious cases and helps diagnose and treat patients remotely. It also paves the way to deliver essential medical devices and medicines to quarantined places. In the present ongoing crisis, IoT technology is inevitable in monitoring patients infected with COVID-19 through sensors and intertwined networks. The consultations are given to the patients digitally through video conferencing without meeting the medical expert in person. After the diagnosis is made digitally, IoT devices are used to track health data. Smart thermometers are used instead of traditional ones to collect valuable health data and share it with experts. The IoT robots are now a proven technology used for cleaning hospitals, disinfecting medical devices, and delivering medicines, thus giving more time to healthcare workers to treat patients.

Digital technology has infiltrated the entire planet. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the two buzzwords that became popular in the current digital world, especially in recent decades. Both these technologies have their contribution in various domains. The existing frameworks will benefit from the AI-IoT collaborative system, which will assist them in having more intelligent or smart responses. Furthermore, these collaborative systems can provide improved devices with better decision-making capacity to facilitate the users. AI can work with IoT to increase functional precision in the healthcare domain by automating and tracking, monitoring, managing, optimizing, and predicting processes in 24x7 mode. Health professionals are the people involved in activities whose primary commitment is to improve the wellbeing of the community. They are a group of people who face various obstacles, including their health and safety concerns, especially during pandemic outbreaks. This book chapter aims to illustrate the impact of AI and IoT on the health care domain and the challenges that healthcare professionals face, especially when dealing with such an pandemic and suggests some potential health care advancements through AI and IoT.

Though it has been some time since the outbreak of the novel COVID-19 disease, it still poses a threat to many people worldwide. Connections have been lost due to the practice of social distancing, both on a personal and a societal level. Due to the global prohibitions on large-scale face-to-face meetings and activities, social media platforms have emerged as a lifesaver for humanity. The role of social media platforms has grown increasingly important for people to express themselves and communicate with others. Besides, the world has also witnessed large-scale events being organized on social media platforms, making connections and interactions with friends, family, and the community via social media networks, as well as the transformation of educational activities into digital activities. Thus, it is pertinent to comprehend the role of social media platforms in maintaining social distancing and online connections during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to generate a discussion on the importance and role of social media platforms to maintain social distancing among individuals. It typically emphasizes three main themes: (1) the importance of social media platforms in establishing as well as improving social distancing during the COVID-19 crisis, (2) the role of social media platforms in maintaining social connections and interactions among individuals during the pandemic, and (3) the impact of Coronavirus towards the use of social media.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an unknown beta coronavirus that comes under the B genus, which causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), a declared universal epidemic, posing a serious menace to human health irrespective of the nationality. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, as of September 10, 2021, there were 223,022,539 positive cases of COVID-19 with 4,602,883 fatalities reported worldwide. A total of 5,352,927,297 vaccine doses have been facilitated since September 5, 2021. This pandemic has become a ravaging illness because of its highly contractible nature and mutations. Many types of research in diverse fields of science have been initiated to suppress the effects and manage the havoc. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is classified as a subdomain of science, which most certainly contributed to numerous applications in confronting the present state at a broader level. In this chapter, we have tried to explore state-of-the-art AI techniques implemented in the perspective of COVID-19 across multiple subjects of concern. The AI approaches are utilized in the treatment, diagnosis, prediction of recovery, severity and mortality of patients, chest X-Ray and computed tomography-based analysis, pandemic prediction, its control and management, pharmaceutical research, COVID-19 text corpus processing, and virus apprehension. Thus, the comprehension of various applications is meant to enlighten the status of AI in this pandemonium. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions and remarks to tackle the disaster in an improved way. 

 The emerging development in industrial technology for automation and data sharing is known as Industry 4.0. It incorporates the Internet of Things, Cyber-physical systems, and Cloud computing, all of which contribute to the development of a “smart factory”. Customers, distributors, vendors, and stakeholders in the supply chain would be capable of connecting and can exchange data easily through Industry 4.0. The COVID-19 pandemic is quickly spreading and posing a threat to people all over the world. Employment and activities in all markets have been disrupted, putting economies all over the world in serious jeopardy. To combat the pandemic, retailers will benefit from Industry 4.0 because it will help to mitigate the impact of identified risks. I4.0 executives were focused on gaining a competitive edge, rising efficiency, lowering prices, and, ensuring profitability as their primary aim was to enhance the productivity of business during the time before the COVID-19 crisis. Our Government has imposed new behavioral trends including social distancing, isolation and, lockdown. The Government needs additional financial resources to combat pandemics as a result of these actions, there has been a global economic slowdown. This chapter enlightens the significance and technologies of Industry 4.0, showing how those technologies and applications help in attaining a better society. It also explains how Industry 4.0 helps in accomplishing sustainable manufacturing and the management tactics it used to boost the company's efficiency, as well as the effects of COVID-19.