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Benjamin Babine, Abuja
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) had said that deploying Internet of Things (IoT) can help combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic better.
The Agency made this remark in a statement on Thursday marking the celebration of the World Internet of Things (IoT) Day. The statement signed by NITDA’s spokesperson, Hadiza Umar, recalls that IoT Council in 2010 set aside the 9th April to commemorate the IoT technology.
She said IoT can aide governments and medical personnel in ensuring compliance to stay at home orders as well as help in diagnosing and treating the virus. The use of the technology, according to the agency, can help minimise contact between cases and health workers, thereby minimising attendant risks.
NITDA stated: “The significance of IoT, particularly in this trying time of the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot be overemphasised. It is unfortunately experienced in recent times that the COVID-19 outbreak is a global crisis, impacting almost all human endeavours, particularly the health sector.
“In the heath sector, IoT could be used to fight the virus outbreak and enforcement of lockdowns where necessary in combination with the Geographic Information System (GIS) and other appropriate technologies.
“Innovative IoT devices such as drones can be used to monitor and enforce compliance of government’s directives of social distancing and prohibition of mass gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.
“They can also track crowd sizes in real-time as well as coughing and temperature measurements to determine COVID-19 symptoms through analytics from the real-time data generated.
“Furthermore, IoT can be used to ensure patients’ compliance or breach of quarantine etiquettes through remote monitoring by healthcare workers. The data generated therein can be used to track down who else can be vulnerable as a result of a breach. Patient management is another area of IoT application.
“It can enable monitoring of all patients who are high-risk enough to warrant quarantine but not serious enough for in-hospital care against the current practice of manual door-to-door patient checking which could be contagious.”
NITDA said it is making efforts at creating opportunities for the adoption of innovative IoT solutions to address Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges in different sectors of the economy.
