As a result of the difficulties brought by COVID-19 and its associated lockdowns, many individuals and companies have turned to robots in order to overcome the challenges of the pandemic. Compared with traditional human labor, robotic and autonomous systems have advantages such as an intrinsic immunity to the virus and an inability for human-robot-human spread of any disease-causing pathogens, though there are still many technical hurdles for the robotics industry to overcome. This survey comprehensively reviews over 200 reports covering robotic systems which have emerged or have been repurposed during the past several months, to provide insights to both academia and industry. In each chapter, we cover both the advantages and the challenges for each robot, finding that robotics systems are overall apt solutions for dealing with many of the problems brought on by COVID-19, including: diagnosis, screening, disinfection, surgery, telehealth, care, logistics, manufacturing and broader interpersonal problems unique to the lockdowns of the pandemic. By discussing the potential new robot capabilities and fields they applied to, we expect the robotics industry to take a leap forward due to this unexpected pandemic.

/pdf/robots-under-covid-19-pandemic-a-comprehensive-survey-39kp93qjjw.pdf

Robots Under COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comprehensive Survey

How to effectively intergrate multiple heterogeneous data sources is a challenging issue for cooperation and interoperability to become a CIMS enterprisethis paper focuses on capturing and reasoning about semantic aspects of schematic descriptions of heterogeneous information sources for supporting integration and query optimization

Semantic integration of structured and semistructured data sources

Mobile health (m-health) is the term of monitoring the health using mobile phones and patient monitoring devices etc. It has been often deemed as the substantial breakthrough in technology in this modern era. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics have been applied within the m-health for providing an effective healthcare system. Various types of data such as electronic health records (EHRs), medical images, and complicated text which are diversified, poorly interpreted, and extensively unorganized have been used in the modern medical research. This is an important reason for the cause of various unorganized and unstructured datasets due to emergence of mobile applications along with the healthcare systems. In this paper, a systematic review is carried out on application of AI and the big data analytics to improve the m-health system. Various AI-based algorithms and frameworks of big data with respect to the source of data, techniques used, and the area of application are also discussed. This paper explores the applications of AI and big data analytics for providing insights to the users and enabling them to plan, using the resources especially for the specific challenges in m-health, and proposes a model based on the AI and big data analytics for m-health. Findings of this paper will guide the development of techniques using the combination of AI and the big data as source for handling m-health data more effectively.

/pdf/applications-of-artificial-intelligence-and-big-data-4co7e7wdur.pdf

Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in m-Health: A Healthcare System Perspective.

Telehealth literature has grown over the years to be a substantial body of work. However, research still highlights problems in extracting value from telehealth activities. In this paper, we analyse the telehealth literature over the period 2000–2015. The methodology focuses on paradoxes or surprises in the findings. We explain the lack of an operating model for telehealth as a debilitating feature of its history. We also note that many of the barriers cited in the literature have not changed over the period. We call for a focused research agenda on telehealth that provides clear evidence for some of the benefits such as cost savings and patient benefits. If telehealth activities are to progress, fundamental issues need to be addressed both in research and practice. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Paradoxes of Telehealth: a Review of the Literature 2000–2015

Quality and safety of the cold chain undergo strict international regulations that identify storage and shipping temperatures In fact, the improper handling and transportation of temperature-sensitive products such as food and pharmaceuticals may have harmful effects on human health and a negative economic impact A passive RFID tag modified with a copper-doped ionic liquid was used to detect the crossing of a temperature threshold (8 °C) during the shipping of medical products The tag was insensitive to humidity variations and irreversibly changed its status once temperature exceeded the ionic liquid melting point, which can be tuned by changing the concentration of dopant

A temperature-sensitive RFID tag for the identification of cold chain failures

The mobile-devices assisted healthcare and medical applications are expected to create the next breakthrough in demand for smartphones and mobile services. In the last decades we witnesses aging of populations and fast growth of healthcare related expenses. This leads to growth of demand for inexpensive and efficient health monitoring solutions. Mobile phone is the best positioned candidate device for managing aggregation and preliminary analysis of personal data, including information about health and physical activities. Because of that the idea of personal assistant device for health monitoring and early diagnostics of diseases is getting more and more popular. This paper discusses the main currently developed use cases and top trends in development of mobile healthcare use scenarios. In our studies we reviewed and analyzed broad variety of mHealth use cases, i.e., starting from monitors of the most relevant health parameters and updates personal medical record (e.g., blood pressure, ECG, breath activity, etc.), to advanced cloud systems that performs personalized diagnostics and recommendations on healthy behavior and individual medical smart systems that perform advance diagnostic of user's health and modeling of potential trends and negative developments.

/pdf/main-trends-in-mhealth-use-scenarios-12jv08fx23.pdf

Main Trends in mHealth Use Scenarios

This paper presents the result of an investigation how Unmanned Aviation Systems were applied in the first half of 2020 in response to the coronavirus COVID-19 challenges. The application cases collected and referenced in this paper are pandemic specific only even though many of them may be considered as typical. An important discovery was that the majority of limitations preventing the high spread of UAS applications are not technological. Nevertheless, innovative technologies, application cases and services that have originated during the pandemic period are expected to evolve and adapt to other situations and shape the future markets.

UAS (drone) in Response to Coronavirus

In this paper a collection of technical solutions and results of simulation, supporting the concept of management a small group of unmanned aerial vehicles such as drones, are presented. The focus is given on collision avoiding and communications. The anti-collision system utilises the drone camera and is built on the Robot Operating System using the Histogram of Oriented Gradients and the Support Vector Machine. The proposed inter-drone communication employs ZigBee for system management and telecommunication networks for data exchange and teleoperations.

/pdf/uav-management-system-for-the-smart-city-21afocygdw.pdf

UAV Management System for the Smart City

This paper gives and overview of Cold Chain temperature measuring solutions available on a commercial market and introduces an approach of building a smart system for fresh fish transportation, called Smart-Fish. The system measurement ability ranges beyond a temperature measurement. It also features a GPS-based tracking and may be equipped with other types of sensors. A great domain-specific applicability for real-time measures and potentially low production cost stands the system out of crowd of similar solutions. Printed electronics technologies were utilised for temperature sensor, the key element of the system. The paper describes a set of requirements, results of material tests and final selection of material for this element.

Vadim Kramar

Papers

Main Trends in mHealth Use Scenarios

UAS (drone) in Response to Coronavirus

UAV Management System for the Smart City

Smart-fish system for fresh fish cold chain transportation — Overall approach and selection of sensor materials

UAS (drone) Arctic Challenges : Next Steps