The Last Mile of M-Connected-Healthcare in the Covid Age: Data Sharing at Large Scale

Aim of the paper is to illustrate a platform for that supports the link between the patient and doctors, family members, clinical laboratories and hospitals, that is a platform that supports the last mile between patients and the entire healthcare network so that the personal data collected by edge devices don't remain confined locally at the patient side but are shared at large scale to aid the patients anywhere and anytime. In particular the paper illustrates from the engineering point of view how implementing the last mile for Covid monitoring and control in practice by means of available Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs), i.e., edge IoT devices provided with communication and computational functions, freeware home control systems and low cost relevant web services available on the market. The key element of our proposal is the one of using a portable BLE/MQTT gateway or to develop DIY MQTT sensors to allow health measurements taken by edge devices to be sent to a remote automated control system supervised by a doctor. A detailed analysis is carried out on the contact and contactless sensors that can be integrated in our platform from the more and more diffused smart bands and ibeacons until the IR thermal cameras. For each considered sensor, the paper discusses its integration it in the platform and the global scenario in which it may be used effectively.