Exploring an Efficient Remote Biomedical Signal Monitoring Framework for Personal Health in the COVID-19 Pandemic

A systematic review and knowledge mapping on ICT-based remote and automatic COVID-19 patient monitoring and care

BACKGROUND

e-Health has played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic in primary health care. e-Health is the cost-effective and secure use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to support health and health-related fields. Various stakeholders worldwide use ICTs, including individuals, non-profit organizations, health practitioners, and governments. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ICT has improved the quality of healthcare, the exchange of information, training of healthcare professionals and patients, and facilitated the relationship between patients and healthcare providers. This study systematically reviews the literature on ICT-based automatic and remote monitoring methods, as well as different ICT techniques used in the care of COVID-19-infected patients.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this systematic literature review is to identify the e-Health methods, associated ICTs, method implementation strategies, information collection techniques, advantages, and disadvantages of remote and automatic patient monitoring and care in COVID-19 pandemic.

METHODS

The search included primary studies that were published between January 2020 and June 2022 in scientific and electronic databases, such as EBSCOhost, Scopus, ACM, Nature, SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, JMIR, Web of Science, Science Direct, and PubMed. In this review, the findings from the included publications are presented and elaborated according to the identified research questions. Evidence-based systematic reviews and meta-analyses were conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. Additionally, we improved the review process using the Rayyan tool and the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles (SANRA). Among the eligibility criteria were methodological rigor, conceptual clarity, and useful implementation of ICTs in e-Health for remote and automatic monitoring of COVID-19 patients.

RESULTS

Our initial search identified 664 potential studies; 102 were assessed for eligibility in the pre-final stage and 65 articles were used in the final review with the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The review identified the following eHealth methods-Telemedicine, Mobile Health (mHealth), and Telehealth. The associated ICTs are Wearable Body Sensors, Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, Internet-of-Things, or Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoT or IoMT), Biometric Monitoring Technologies (BioMeTs), and Bluetooth-enabled (BLE) home health monitoring devices. Spatial or positional data, personal and individual health, and wellness data, including vital signs, symptoms, biomedical images and signals, and lifestyle data are examples of information that is managed by ICTs. Different AI and IoT methods have opened new possibilities for automatic and remote patient monitoring with associated advantages and weaknesses. Our findings were represented in a structured manner using a semantic knowledge graph (e.g., ontology model).

CONCLUSIONS

Various e-Health methods, related remote monitoring technologies, different approaches, information categories, the adoption of ICT tools for an automatic remote patient monitoring (RPM), advantages and limitations of RMTs in the COVID-19 case are discussed in this review. The use of e-Health during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the constraints and possibilities of using ICTs. ICTs are not merely an external tool to achieve definite remote and automatic health monitoring goals; instead, they are embedded in contexts. Therefore, the importance of the mutual design process between ICT and society during the global health crisis has been observed from a social informatics perspective. A global health crisis can be observed as an information crisis (e.g., insufficient information, unreliable information, and inaccessible information); however, this review shows the influence of ICTs on COVID-19 patients' health monitoring and related information collection techniques.

5G in Healthcare: from COVID-19 to Future Challenges

Worldwide up to May 2022 there have been 515 million cases of COVID-19 infection and over 6 million deaths. The World Health Organization estimated that 115,000 healthcare workers died from COVID-19 from January 2020 to May 2021. This toll on human lives prompted this review on 5G based networking primarily on major components of healthcare delivery: diagnosis, patient monitoring, contact tracing, diagnostic imaging tests, vaccines distribution, emergency medical services, telesurgery and robot-assisted tele-ultrasound. The positive impact of 5G as core technology for COVID-19 applications enabled exchange of huge data sets in fangcang (cabin) hospitals and real-time contact tracing, while the low latency enhanced robot-assisted tele-ultrasound, and telementoring during ophthalmic surgery. In other instances, 5G provided a supportive technology for applications related to COVID-19, e.g., patient monitoring. The feasibility of 5G telesurgery was proven, albeit by a few studies on real patients, in very low samples size in most instances. The important future applications of 5G in healthcare include surveillance of elderly people, the immunosuppressed, and nano- oncology for Internet of Nano Things (IoNT). Issues remain and these require resolution before routine clinical adoption. These include infrastructure and coverage; health risks; security and privacy protection of patients' data; 5G implementation with artificial intelligence, blockchain, and IoT; validation, patient acceptance and training of end-users on these technologies.

Social Relationship Prediction Integrating Personality Traits and Asymmetric Interactions

Social networks have become an important way for users to find friends and expand their social circle. Social networks can improve users’ experience by recommending more suitable friends to them. The key lies in improving the accuracy of link prediction, which is also the main research issue of this study. In the study of personality traits, some scholars have proved that personality can be used to predict users’ behavior in social networks. Based on these studies, this study aims to improve the accuracy of link prediction in directed social networks. Considering the integration of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction into the link prediction model of social networks, a four-dimensional link prediction model is proposed. Through comparative experiments, it is proved that the four-dimensional social relationship prediction model proposed in this study is more accurate than the model only based on similarity. At the same time, it is also verified that the matching degree of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction intensity in the model can help improve the accuracy of link prediction.

Data-Driven Dynamic Adjustment and Optimization Model of Emergency Logistics Network in Public Health

Background and Aim

In the long-term prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic, parameters may change frequently for various reasons, such as the emergence of mutant strains and changes in government policies. These changes will affect the efficiency of the current emergency logistics network. Public health emergencies have typical unstructured characteristics such as blurred transmission boundaries and dynamic time-varying scenarios, thus requiring continuous adjustment of emergency logistics network to adapt to the actual situation and make a better rescue.

Practical Significance

The infectivity of public health emergencies has shown a tendency that it first increased and then decreased in the initial decision-making cycle, and finally reached the lowest point in a certain decision-making cycle. This suggests that the number of patients will peak at some point in the cycle, after which the public health emergency will then be brought under control and be resolved. Therefore, in the design of emergency logistics network, the infectious ability of public health emergencies should be fully considered (ie, the prediction of the number of susceptible population should be based on the real-time change of the infectious ability of public health emergencies), so as to make the emergency logistics network more reasonable.

Methods

In this paper, we build a data-driven dynamic adjustment and optimization model for the decision-making framework with an innovative emergency logistics network in this paper. The proposed model divides the response time to emergency into several consecutive decision-making cycles, and each of them contains four repetitive steps: (1) analysis of public health emergency transmission; (2) design of emergency logistics network; (3) data collection and processing; (4) adjustment and update of parameters.

Results

The result of the experiment shows that dynamic adjustment and update of parameters help to improve the accuracy of describing the evolution of public health emergency transmission. The model successively transforms the public health emergency response into the co-evolution of data learning and optimal allocation of resources.

Conclusion

Based on the above results, it is concluded that the model we designed in this paper can provide multiple real-time and effective suggestions for policy adjustment in public health emergency management. When responding to other emergencies, our model can offer helpful decision-making references.

Online Rumor Diffusion Model Based on Variation and Silence Phenomenon in the Context of COVID-19

In the era of mobile internet, information dissemination has made a new leap in speed and in breadth. With the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the COVID-19 rumor diffusion that is not limited by time and by space often becomes extremely complex and fickle. It is also normal that a piece of unsubstantiated news about COVID-19 could develop to many versions. We focus on the stagnant role and information variants in the process of rumor diffusion about COVID-19, and through the study of variability and silence in the dissemination, which combines the effects of stagnation phenomenon and information variation on the whole communication system in the circulation of rumors about COVID-19, based on the classic rumor SIR (Susceptible Infected Recovered) model, we introduce a new concept of “variation” and “oyster”. The stability of the new model is analyzed by the mean field equation, and the threshold of COVID-19 rumor propagation is obtained later. According to the results of the simulation experiment, whether in the small world network or in the scale-free network, the increase of the immure and the silent probability of the variation can effectively reduce the speed of rumor diffusion about COVID-19 and is conducive to the dissemination of the truth in the whole population. Studies have also shown that increasing the silence rate of variation can reduce COVID-19 rumor transmission more quickly than the immunization rate. The interesting discovery is that at the same time, a higher rumor infection rate can bring more rumors about COVID-19 but does not always maintain a high number of the variation which could reduce variant tendency of rumors. The more information diffuses in the social group, the more consistent the version and content of the information will be, which proves that the more adequate each individual information is, the slower and less likely rumors about COVID-19 spread. This consequence tells us that the government needs to guide the public to the truth. Announcing the true information publicly could instantly contain the COVID-19 rumor diffusion well rather than making them hidden or voiceless.

Exploring an Efficient POI Recommendation Model Based on User Characteristics and Spatial-Temporal Factors

The advent of mobile scenario-based consumption popularizes and gradually maturates the application of point of interest (POI) recommendation services based on geographical location. However, the insufficient fusion of heterogeneous data in the current POI recommendation services leads to poor recommendation quality. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid POI recommendation model (NHRM) based on user characteristics and spatial-temporal factors to enhance the recommendation effect. The proposed model contains three sub-models. The first model considers user preferences, forgetting characteristics, user influence, and trajectories. The second model studies the impact of the correlation between the locations of POIs and calculates the check-in probability of POI with the two-dimensional kernel density estimation method. The third model analyzes the influence of category of POI. Consequently, the above results were combined and top-K POIs were recommended to target users. The experimental results on Yelp and Meituan data sets showed that the recommendation performance of our method is superior to some other methods, and the problems of cold-start and data sparsity are alleviated to a certain extent.