U4SSC – Smart public health emergency management and ICT implementations

Smart sustainable cities (SSC), predicated on ICT-based innovation, are capable of fostering data-driven smart applications to manage limited resources and implement them to thwart the advent of future pandemics of the same magnitude as that of Covid-19.

This document explores the context of public health (including digital health) and the importance of active surveillance mechanisms in the urban ecosystem to enable emerging communications for public health disasters and the incorporation of IoT, AI and data-driven frameworks to provide timely responses to epidemics and pandemics, while implementing generic public health operational processes derived from the methodologies adopted for past crises. Moreover, this document concludes with a smart public health framework, which utilizes these tools, defines a pandemic lifecycle and specifies when mass surveillance tools are applied (for dealing with the outbreak).