IoT-Based Indoor and Outdoor Self-Quarantine System for COVID-19 Patients

Even after two years since the declaration of the new virus Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19), the reported cases are still considerably high in many countries, including Malaysia. The health authorities cannot monitor the health condition and track the location of every home-monitored patient at once due to many confirmed cases in a day. In order to overcome the shortage of manpower, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based self-quarantine system with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking is proposed in this paper to monitor the health conditions of the Covid-19 patients and track their real-time location via mobile application. Biomedical sensors are used to measure health conditions such as temperature, pulse oximetry, and heart-rate monitor. In addition, the RFID readers are used to detect patients that intend to leave the quarantine area, and the GPS modules are used to track their actual geometrical location so that the authorities can take further action. The real-time data is automatically pushed to the cloud server for the authorities to remotely view the patient's health condition and location on the Google map using smart devices. Finally, a hardware prototype and a mobile application have been successfully developed in this project. The system is able to display the temperature, heartbeats, and blood oxygen saturation properly on a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. All these measured values, together with the information from RFID detection and GPS location tracking, can be viewed on a smartphone.