Covid Waste Management Using IoT: A Smart Framework

ABSTRACT

The influence of Covid-19 is reshaping our daily life. Along with protecting lives, management of contaminated covid wastes is very essential to reduce environmental and human health risks. Inappropriate management of covid wastes can cause serious possibilities of disease transmission to health workers, waste pickers, patients, and the community in general through spreading of Corona virus. Poor management of these infected wastes has created huge problems in healthcare waste handling as the amount of waste generated due to pandemic is excessively large. In this paper, we have presented an Internet of Things(IoT)-based smart framework for covid waste management. We have proposed two types of smart covid waste bins here, one for collecting covid wastes for home isolated patients and other for covid medical wastes, generated from hospitals/nursing homes, etc. These intelligent bins can capture waste information automatically by attached sensors, and the collected data is sent wirelessly to remote municipality server for further analysis. Municipality officials can take decisions such as number of bins to be deployed, at which time intervals wastes are to be cleared, etc., based on those information. The proposed framework minimizes the human interaction with the covid waste and restricts the spreading of virus. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.