Dear Colleagues,

Coronavirus will not be the last pandemic in our lifetime considering factors such as increased population density, growing capacity to travel across the globe, environmental changes, infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans, etc. Therefore, the risk of a new pandemic is higher now than ever before. COVID-19 has shown us the lack of smart systems in healthcare organizations for pandemic response (e.g., early reporting of the risk of the pandemic outbreak). The better data drive smarter and earlier decisions. The combination of advanced technologies of Healthcare 5.0, including nanotechnology, 5G technologies, drone technology, blockchain, digital twins, robotics, big data, IoT, AI, and cloud computing, has significant advantages in designing smart systems for pandemic preparedness. Although there has been significant progress towards smart and connected healthcare systems during the pandemic, more research innovation, dissemination and technologies are needed to unbundle new opportunities and move towards adopting Healthcare 5.0 for pandemic preparedness to save human lives.

This Special Issue of Computers presents cutting-edge research and commentary to explore the future of adopting Healthcare 5.0 technologies for pandemic preparedness. Researchers, developers, and industry practitioners working in this area are invited to present their views and research work on the current pandemic preparedness trends.

Therefore, the suggested topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Pandemic alerting frameworks and systems;
• Applications for pandemic preparedness;
• IoT solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Blockchain solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Collaborative solutions based on Healthcare 5.0 for pandemic preparedness;
• Digital twins/ Digital twin collaboration solutions for pandemic preparedness;
• Federated learning, machine learning, and deep learning for pandemic preparedness;
• Personalised COVID-19 medicine;
• COVID-19 survivor follow-up care;
• Robot collaboration for contact-less systems to combat the pandemic outbreak;
• Drone collaboration to combat the pandemic outbreak;
• Cloud computing;
• Big data/healthcare data;
• 5/6G roles for pandemic response;
• Human-in-the-loop AI for pandemic response;
• Explainable AI for diagnosis;
• Smart decision-making for pandemic response;
• Remote patient care for combating the pandemic outbreak.

Dr. Xuhui Chen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Computers is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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• pandemic alerting
• IoT
• blockchain
• digital twins
• digital twin collaboration
• personal digital twins
• human digital twins
• federated learning
• machine learning
• deep learning
• personalised COVID-19 medicine
• COVID-19 survivor follow-up care
• robot collaboration
• drone collaboration
• cloud computing
• big data
• 5/6G
• human-in-the-loop AI for healthcare
• explainable AI
• smart decision making
• remote patient care