Future Systems Based on Healthcare 5.0 for Pandemic Preparedness

Dear Colleagues,

Increased population density, our growing capacity to travel across the globe, environmental changes, infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans, etc. probably mean that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in our lifetime. In fact, the risk of a new pandemic is higher now than ever before. COVID-19 has pointed out the lack of smart systems in healthcare organizations for pandemic response (e.g., early reporting of the risk of a pandemic outbreak). Better data drive smarter and earlier decisions, and the combination of the advanced technologies of Healthcare 5.0, including nanotechnology, 5G technologies, drone technology, blockchain, digital twins, robotics, big data, IoT, AI, and cloud computing, has significant advantages in the design of smart systems for pandemic preparedness. Although there has been significant progress toward smart and connected healthcare systems during the pandemic, more research innovation, dissemination, and technologies are needed to unbundle new opportunities and move toward adopting Healthcare 5.0 for pandemic preparedness to save human lives.

This Special Issue of Computers presents cutting-edge research and commentaries to explore the future of adopting Healthcare 5.0 technologies for pandemic preparedness. Researchers, developers, and industry practitioners working in this area are invited to present their views and research work on the current pandemic preparedness trends.

Therefore, the suggested topics of interest for the Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Pandemic alerting frameworks and systems;
• Applications for pandemic preparedness;
• IoT solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Blockchain solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Collaborative solutions based on Healthcare 5.0 for pandemic preparedness;
• Digital twins/digital twin collaboration solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Federated learning, machine learning, and deep learning for pandemic preparedness;
• Personalized COVID-19 medicine;
• COVID-19 survivor follow-up care;
• Robot collaboration for contactless systems to combat the pandemic outbreak;
• Drone collaboration to combat the pandemic outbreak;
• Cloud computing;
• Big data/healthcare data;
• 5/6G roles for pandemic response;
• Human-in-the-loop AI for pandemic response;
• Explainable AI for diagnosis;
• Smart decision making for pandemic response;
• Remote patient care for combating the pandemic outbreak.

Dr. Radhya Sahal
Dr. Xuhui Chen
Dr. Hager Saleh
Guest Editors

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