A UAV-based portable health clinic system for coronavirus hotspot areas

Abstract

This study applied the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines to redesign the Portable Health Clinic (PHC), as a Remote Healthcare System (RHS), for the spread of COVID-19 containment. Additionally, the proposed drone-based system not only collects people data but also classifies the case according to the main symptoms of coronavirus using the COVID-19 triage process (CT-process) based on the analysis of measurement readings taken from patients, where drones are used in a swarm as a PHC platform and are equipped with the required sensors and essential COVID-19 medications for testing and treating people at their doorstep autonomously when a full curfew is imposed. This paper describes a complete framework and proposes currently in production hardware to build the suggested system, considering the effect of the extra payload weight on drone's durability. In addition, part of the proposed application was simulated using OPNET simulation tool. This work highlights the main aspects that should be considered when designing drone swarm-based system and distributing the roles on system nodes with the main focus on the controlling messages for inter-swarm and intra-swarm communication and coordination.