Role of AI, IoT, and IoD in avoiding and minimizing risks of future pandemics

Pandemics have been affecting our societies from time to time. The 1918 Spanish flu, also known as influenza pandemic, took away the life of more than 500 million people. In 1957, East Asia saw the emergence of the Asian flu which took a toll on the human civilization with the loss of around 1.1 million people. The year 1968 saw the rise of H3N2 virus causing the Hong Kong flu and decreasing the population by 4 million. The latest pandemic Corona virus-19 (COVID-19) affected the whole world and reduced the world population by 5.4 million. It is evident that with the enormous advancement of the field of technology and medicine, humans are not fully safe. These advancements are not enough to protect humans from disasters. It is an old saying "prevention is better than cure." It implies that we, with those advancements, still have to be well prepared for such types of drastic events. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Internet of things (IoT), and Internet of drones (IoD) are the current technologies which can help us in the future to predict, counter, and minimize the effects of pandemics. In this chapter, the authors have discussed how AI, IoT, and IoD technologies can assist and aid humans in overcoming as well as minimizing the consequences of such pandemics.