Call for Articles

The recent surge of COVID-19 pandemic has affected all spheres of our daily life. While virologists are desperately seeking solutions for an early vaccine, a cross-disciplinary approach has become of paramount importance to develop adequate monitoring, contact tracing, and diagnosing/detecting COVID-19 patients. This Feature Topic (FT) aims to encourage researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia, active in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, to explore the state-of-the-art and out-of-the-box IoT solutions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by incorporating IoT-based smart solutions. Such solutions can range from IoT-based industrial production of ventilation units, masks and other medical equipment to monitoring patient conditions at hospitals or self-isolation at home in a secure manner, developing new techniques for passive, privacy-preserving contact-tracing techniques, and diagnosing the COVID-19 conditions based on IoT and mobile phone data collection and analytics, to smart Point-of-Care (POC) development not limited to the current gold standard of Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) testing kits. Even as we continue to struggle to contain the current COVID-19 pandemic, the second wave of this life-threatening disease is looming on the horizon. Therefore, to fully prepare ourselves to combat COVID-19, researchers from all areas, including Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and IoT, need to provide the cutting-edge solutions to address these challenges in an efficient yet pragmatic manner.

This Feature Topic (FT) is soliciting original technical papers addressing the main research challenges in the direction of IoT-based COVID-19 monitoring and detection and relevant applications, including, but not being limited to the following topics:

• Smart and energy-efficient sensor design for collecting COVID-19 symptoms
• Emerging applications of IoT-based home monitoring for COVID-19 patients
• Reliable and secure/privacy-preserving contact tracing applications using IoT
• Edge computing for COVID-19 analytics
• Distributed contact tracing for neighborhoods using IoT
• Cloud-managed IoT services for COVID-19 social data mining for mobility pattern detection
• Cellular density/broadcast utilization for COVID-19 spread monitoring
• Industrial IoT devices for reliable production of healthcare equipment for combating COVID-19 patients
• Protecting supply chain during COVID-19 using IoT
• Point-of-Care (POC) platform design using IoT sensors to combat COVID-19
• AI (deep learning/machine learning) based analytics on smart sensors and POC platforms to detect COVID-19 with high sensitivity
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystem design for combating the second/future wave of COVID-19
• Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-assisted IoT for detecting COVID-19 breach in neighborhoods and hospitals
• Use cases of IoT networks/systems for combating COVID-19
• Device-to-Device (D2D) communications for combating COVID-19 and other pandemics during humanitarian missions (i.e., in warzones, disaster-affected areas, etc)
• Security, privacy, and trust management for IoT-based monitoring, detecting, contact-tracing of COVID-19
• Stress monitoring for mental wellbeing tracking during self-isolation and/or lockdown situations
• Chronic patient monitoring and early warning systems using IoT for optimal scheduling of patients
• Validation using simulation, clinical trials with IoT sensors/wearables and/or testbeds

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Article Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “September 2020: Smart IoT Solutions for Combating COVID-19 Pandemic” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 19 July 2020
Initial Decision: 31 July 2020
Revised Manuscript Due: 31 August 2020
Publication Date: September 2020

Guest Editors

Zubair Md. Fadlullah
Lakehead University, Canada
Thunder Bay Regional Health Research Institute (TBRHRI), Canada

Mostafa M. Fouda
Tennessee Technological University, TN, USA
Benha University, Egypt

Al-Sakib Khan Pathan
Independent University, Bangladesh

Nidal Nasser
Alfaisal University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abderrahim Benslimane
University of Avignon, France

Ying-Dar Lin
National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan