CONFRONT: Cloud-fog-dew based monitoring framework for COVID-19 management

Poonia, Anish; Ghosh, Shreya; Ghosh, Akash; Nath, Shubha Brata; Ghosh, Soumya K.; Buyya, Rajkumar

In the recent times, the IoT (Internet of Things) enabled devices and applications have seen a rapid growth in various sectors including healthcare. The ability of low-cost connected sensors to cover large areas makes it a potential tool in the fight against pandemics, like COVID-19. The COVID-19 has posed a formidable challenge for the developing countries, like India, which need to cater to large population base with limited health infrastructure. In this paper, we proposed a Cloud-fog-dew based mOnitoriNg Framework foR cOvid-19 maNagemenT, called CONFRONT. This cloud-fog-dew based healthcare model may help in preliminary diagnosis and also in monitoring patients while they are in quarantine facilities or home based treatments. The fog architecture ensures that the model is suited for real-time scenarios while keeping the bandwidth requirements low. To analyse large scale COVID-19 statistics data for extracting aggregate information of the disease spread, the cloud servers are leveraged due to its scalable computational and storage capabilities. The dew architecture ensures that the application is available at a limited scale even when cloud connectivity is lost, leading to a faster uptime for the application. A low cost wearable device consisting of heterogeneous sensors has also been designed and fabricated to realize the proposed framework.