Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Mobilization of Assessments in COVID-19-Like Pandemics: A Case Study for Early Flattening of the Curve

• Main Authors: Murat Simsek, Burak Kantarci
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
• Series: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; public health; COVID-19; mobile assessment centers; pandemics; epidemics
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/10/3437
• ISSN: 1661-7827; 1660-4601

The global outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has uncovered the fragility of healthcare and public health preparedness and planning against epidemics/pandemics. In addition to the medical practice for treatment and immunization, it is vital to have a thorough understanding of community spread phenomena as related research reports 17.9–30.8% confirmed cases to remain asymptomatic. Therefore, an effective assessment strategy is vital to maximize tested population in a short amount of time. This article proposes an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven mobilization strategy for mobile assessment agents for epidemics/pandemics. To this end, a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is trained by using data acquired from past mobile crowdsensing (MCS) campaigns to model mobility patterns of individuals in multiple districts of a city so to maximize the assessed population with minimum agents in the shortest possible time. Through simulation results for a real street map on a mobile crowdsensing simulator and considering the worst case analysis, it is shown that on the 15th day following the first confirmed case in the city under the risk of community spread, AI-enabled mobilization of assessment centers can reduce the unassessed population size down to one fourth of the unassessed population under the case when assessment agents are randomly deployed over the entire city.