Sustainable Personalized Home Care for Pandemic Management: A Service-Oriented Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how a viral disease originating in one part of the world rapidly spread the entire globe in just a few weeks, causing a complete shutdown of socio-economic activities in almost all countries. We have seen that during vaccine unavailability, social distancing, rigorous contact tracing, and case isolation are found to be the most effective strategies to contain the disease outbreak. For effective management of home-based isolation, patient care should not be limited to the illness but should also take into account other factors that are related to the needs and sustenance of patients and their dependents. In this paper, we first present retrospective case studies of South Asian countries, discuss the strategies and technological interventions employed to fight the pandemic, and underscore the significant issues that persist and require action. Second, building upon the insights from these case studies, we propose an integrated service-oriented system that supports seamless interfacing and information sharing with the functional systems of service providers/ caregivers to develop, manage, and monitor care plans for patients undergoing home isolation. The viability of our proposed framework is demonstrated by providing a proof-of-concept implementation. Further, we discuss the technical issues and policy considerations for practical and sustainable deployment of such system(s).