COVID-19 pandemic: a review of smart cities initiatives to face new outbreaks

While the world still struggles against the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and organisations are discussing how new technologies can be exploited to relieve its impacts and how future pandemics can be avoided or minimised. Among the envisioned solutions, the development of more efficient and widespread smart city initiatives can improve the way critical data is retrieved, processed, stored, and disseminated, potentially improving the detection and mitigation of outbreaks while reducing the execution time when taking critical actions. In fact, some first responses to this pandemic are exploiting different technological solutions that could be ultimately adopted in more integrated city-scale systems, opening many possibilities. Therefore, this study discusses potential solutions and review recent approaches that can be exploited in this complex scenario, describing feasible and promising development trends for the construction of the new expected health-centric smart cities.