Author: Kavindu Samaranayake
Samaranayake, Kavindu, 2023 DATABASE ASPECTS FOR A SINGLE PLATFORM TO TREAT AND CONTROL INFECTIOUS DISEASE USING HEALTHCARE METAVERSE AND DIGITAL TWINNING, Flinders University, College of Science and Engineering
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The recent global pandemic outbreak has reshaped our understanding of healthcare and the need for an effective management of an infectious disease outbreak scenario. This thesis embarks on a necessity requirement of proposing an architecture for treatment and control of infectious disease outbreak which would be helpful on creating the final artefact.
The thesis is structured in the following manner, introduction section presents the need of a platform to treat and control infectious disease, literature review chapter gives a comprehensive overview about existing literature regarding available methods on infectious disease control and treatment. The methodology section will present the structured approach taken to develop the proposed architecture and the results section will present the artifacts discovered after following the proposed methodology. Analysis section of the thesis will give a comprehensive overview of critical findings of the results, discussion section further interprets the results with original goals and additional findings, and the conclusion would contain the final reflection of the thesis.
One of the key factors behind extremely high mortality rate and economic impact during the last pandemic was the world was not prepared for an infectious disease outbreak. One single platform for infectious disease control and treatment is needed to effectively manage an infectious disease outbreak, because to effectively treat and control an infectious disease outbreak, multiple entities must work synchronously. This thesis contains an architecture with necessary entities to successfully treat and control an infectious disease outbreak using digital twinning and metaverse technologies.
Development of the architecture is done through following design science research methodology which is a six-step process for Information System artifact creation. The uniqueness of design science research is its iterative approach to systematically create the information system in such a way that it will bridge the gap between the problem at hand and the solution. Using the design science research methodology, the design and development phases are undertaken through the design of the database architecture. This encompasses conceptual design, logical design, and the physical designs of the proposed database.
During the analysis, it was observed that the data types required for the architecture can contain structured and unstructured data. Whether the database used is SQL or NOSQL there are certain advantages and disadvantages for both types of databases. Because of that the best option when it comes to the actual implementation is to use a multimodal database which can cater to SQL and NOSQL data. A list of recommended vendor databases is given in this thesis according to the analysis of the results.
The proposed architecture needs to be iteratively improved. Any entity that is required, attribute that is required, should be iteratively added until the final artifact is created. Hence, this is not the final architecture, it is an initial stage of a proposed architecture which should be iteratively improved in the future.
Keywords: Conceptual database design, COVID-19, Digital Twinning, Infectious disease, logical database design, Metaverse, Pandemic, Physical database design
Subject: Engineering thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2023
School: College of Science and Engineering
Supervisor: Dr.Lua Perimal-Lewis