Call for Articles

Importance of Topic

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all parts of our daily lives. Different teams of scientists are zealously trying to generate an influential and persistent vaccine, and a multi-disciplinary solution has become of supreme significance to enhance convenient monitoring, liaison determination, and diagnostic/detection of COVID-19 cases. This Special Issue (SI) invites researchers from both industry and academia, active in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Internet of Things (IoT), to present the state-of-the-art and next generation IoT/IoMT studies to combat the COVID-19 pandemics by providing IoT-based intelligent approaches. Such solutions can vary from IoMT-based industrial manufacturing of ventilation tubes, masks, and other medical devices to enhance circumstances of patients at clinics or their self-isolation at home in a secure manner, generating novel and efficient mechanisms for passive, privacy-assuring liaison-tracing solutions, and diagnosing COVID-19 cases based on IoMT and smart phone data gathering and analysis, to intelligent development of testing kits. Even though scientists continue their work to bring the existing COVID-19 pandemic under control, the second wave of this life-threatening global disaster emerged and vaccine application opens the door for pandemic control. As a consequence, to fully equip ourselves to combat COVID-19, researchers and scientists from all around the world, including those working in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), need to create next-generation schemes to solve these problems in an efficient yet serviceable manner.

IoT plays a significant role in the digitalization of logistics and supply chain management. IoT solutions and use cases can strengthen the supply chain for COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Apart from utilizing a connected vehicle for tracking, IoT sensors and actuators can be embedded in vaccine cooling pallets or boxes along with a communication module to collect and analyze data on humidity and temperature. Among all, the temperature sensor will be especially significant as the vaccine needs low temperature. In addition, the vaccine’s distribution can be secured by using scannable barcodes that send data to IoT-based systems in the cloud, or an IoT enabled crypto seal that combines tracking and securing distribution.

This Special Issue is seeking novel technical and industrial solutions addressing the main research challenges and enhancements in line with IoMT-based COVID-19 monitoring, diagnosing, vaccine distribution, vaccine tracking, vaccine cooling, vaccine storage monitoring, vaccinated person identification and relevant studies, including, but not being limited to, the following topics:

• Intelligent and energy-aware sensor design for gathering COVID-19 symptoms
• Novel IoMT-based schemes for home monitoring of COVID-19 patients
• Scalable and robust contact tracing applications utilizing IoMT
• Fog computing solutions for COVID-19 analysis
• Distributed contact detection for neighborhoods supported by IoMT
• Cloud-handled IoMT services for COVID-19 social networking for mobility pattern analysis
• Cellular network usage for COVID-19 spread tracking
• Industrial IoMT equipment for confidential manufacturing of health-care devices for struggling COVID-19 patients
• Preserving the supply chain during COVID-19 using IoMT
• IoMT ecosystem design to combat the second wave of COVID-19
• Software-Defined Networks (SDNs)-based IoMT to detect COVID-19 violation in neighborhoods and clinics
• Use cases of IoMT techniques to combat COVID-19
• Device-to-Device (D2D) techniques to combat COVID-19
• Stress analysis for mental health monitoring under self-isolation and lockdown circumstances
• Chronic patient monitoring and early warning technologies utilizing IoMT for efficient scheduling of patients
• Approval utilizing simulation, clinical trials with IoMT based sensors and wearable devices
• Security and privacy issues in IoMT for COVID-19
• IoMT-based vaccine tracking and distribution
• IoMT-based sensor technologies for vaccine cooling
• IoT-based secure vaccine distribution
• Vaccinated person identification
• Cloud assisted secure vaccine distribution and tracking

The submitted that manuscripts should: a) describe in depth and/or breadth real-world blockchain-based multi-disciplinary IoT/IIoT/IoMT deployments that align with the above-elaborated special issue; b) present actual experiences in resolving contextual IoMT-related challenges; c) develop and share best practices, vision realizations and lessons learned in this integrated medical environment, and d) establish guiding principles for technical, operational and business successes. Articles should be general, independent of technical or business specialty, and intended for an audience consisting of all members of the IoT community working in the medical field.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the ‘Information for Authors’ section of the Article Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select ‘June 2021/Internet of Medical Things in the Context of COVID-19’ from the drop-down menu of Topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Due: 28 February 2021
Revision Notification Due: 31 March 2021
Acceptance Notification Due: 30 April 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 15 May 2021
Publication Date: June 2021

Guest Editors

Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues (Lead Guest Editor)
Federal University of Piauí (UFPI), Brazil; Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal

Korhan Cengiz
Trakya University, Turkey

Muhammad Awais Javed
COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan

Sudeep Tanwar
Nirma University, Ahmedabad, India

Zhaolong Ning
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Sherali Zeadally
University of Kentucky, USA