How Should the Structure of Smart Cities Change to Predict and Overcome a Pandemic?

Abstract

A proposed countermeasure to COVID-19 is a robust healthcare system that can respond and identify transmission paths using information technology. This involves the use of smart city services for tracking an infected person. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare system could only provide data on the number of infected people. Additionally, smart city services could respond neither timely nor sequentially. This study proposed a method for timely and sequential responses, through a flexible combination of the healthcare system and smart city services by envisioning a scenario that sequentially grafts the current status of COVID-19 in Korea. The results are the following. First, the COVID-19 outbreak was summarized in the context of the healthcare system and current smart city services. A method by which the latter could respond to the various needs of the former was suggested. Second, recommendations on combining or dismissing certain smart city services, as per the needs of coping with COVID-19, were summarized. Third, smart city services must be utilized only for addressing pandemics, as data from the healthcare system consists of personal information. Therefore, smart city services for responding to COVID-19 must be flexible.