Towards a Unified Pandemic Management Architecture: Survey, Challenges, and Future Directions

The pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has impacted the economy, health, and society. Emerging strains are making pandemic management challenging. There is an urge to collect epidemiological, clinical, and physiological data to make an informed decision on mitigation. Advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing provide solutions for pandemic management through data collection and intelligent computation. While existing data-driven architectures operate on specific application domains and attempt to automate decision-making, they do not capture the multifaceted interaction among computational models, communication infrastructure, and data. In this article, we survey the existing approaches for pandemic management, including data repositories and contact-tracing applications. We envision a unified pandemic management architecture that leverages the IoT and edge computing paradigms to automate recommendations on vaccine distribution, dynamic lockdown, mobility scheduling, and pandemic trend prediction. We elucidate the data flow among the layers, namely, cloud, edge, and end device layers. Moreover, we address the privacy implications, threats, regulations, and solutions that may be adapted to optimize the utility of health data with security guarantees. The article ends with a discussion of the limitations of the architecture and research directions to enhance its practicality.