5 Techno Trends Fuelled by COVID-19
Companies responded to COVID-19-related changes much quicker than they thought possible before the crisis. They had to speed up digitalization, accelerate supply-chains, introduce remote working and collaboration, respond to the increased demand for online purchasing and services, adopting advanced technologies. While before 2020, the implementation of advanced technologies in a variety of fields was expected to take 672 days, in 2020, on average, it took less than thirty. Some of the technologies are related to operation routines and business decision making, but some are directly connected with innovations and business core. Let’s take a closer look at the top-five techno trends which we saw in 2020 due to Covid-19.
Face recognition is transforming into “eye recognition”
The popularity of masks and barrier systems has created difficulties with technologies such as Face ID, which is seen as a severe security threat in some countries, especially in China, where face recognition is a common technology in airports, streets, shops, and hotels.
To solve the problem, the Chinese company SenseTime introduced a new method of face recognition — it requires not more dots on one’s face to be seen, but more precise analysis of those dots. The new program recognizes faces just by seeing the eye area. It seems like soon, facial recognition will be almost entirely based on analyzing the iris of the eye.
Patient care is taken to a new level of safety
Robots provide wide range assistance in the fight against coronavirus. Most of them were not created from scratch during COVID-19, but adopted from other industries or developed on the base of existing models used for patient care. China and Thailand, for now, are the frontrunners in introducing robotic help to daily medical care operations.
Robots measure body temperature, control the availability of personal protective equipment, and are used to deliver medication and food to patients. Also, some models are already equipped with UV-lights, disinfecting rooms and themselves. They are used as a shielding layer that physically separates a medical worker or a relative/caregiver from a patient. It lowers the risks endured by medical personnel and helps not exhaust the abilities of Covid-19 fighting facilities too much.
Some robots are now responsible for stable video connection between patients and their relatives or medical personnel. Here, we are not speaking about simple messengers, but about movable robotic cameras, like Pepper the Robot, with the expanded functions tailored to the communicational needs and abilities of sick people.
However, there is something robots can’t do for now — they cannot comfort patients on their own. At the current level of development robots are not capable of performing actions that require empathetic intelligence at the human level.
Сlinics care about the safety and effectiveness of the treatment process itself and the accompanying infrastructure, of which nutrition plans are the essential part, as they are officially included in the treatment protocols for many diseases. We receive requests from medical institutions and senior living homes for a commercial model of our Moley Robotic Kitchen, as it automates the cooking process, and eliminates infection risks, partially thanks to the in-built cleaning and UV-disinfection.
While the elder patients remain the major risk group in a course of current pandemic, it is a vital necessity to plan healthy, tasty, various meals for them, both in clinic and caregiving facilities. Projects like Moley Robotics aim to expedite innovations in these fields.
Telemedicine goes from an underdog to a superstar
Applications related to telemedicine saw up to 500% popularity increase this year. Thanks to the new technologies doctors can consult patients remotely, as well as track their further state through recorded and updated vitals.
These and other applications are based on technologies that help to put a bridle on the Covid-19 spread. For example, the mobile application PEPP-PT allows you to trace the chain of infection. Users’ smartphones communicate using Bluetooth wireless technology. Anonymous information is sent to a central server, after which people who have been in contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes over the past two weeks receive mobile notifications and recommendations.
Robert Koch Institute displays information about the spread of the coronavirus on an interactive map. Owners of smartwatches and fitness bracelets can download an application that constantly diagnoses vital signs (heart rate, sleep, activity level). If any of the parameters change significantly, this will mean the onset of the disease.
The secret for AI being efficient in the telemedicine sphere is more players in the industry sharing data for enhancing the machine learning algorithms used in this field. No matter how difficult the COVID-19 spread is for the medical care sector, it allows to collect invaluable data related to pandemic. In the future, these data sets will be analyzed and used to create more efficient reaction-protocols, assistance centers’ organization and diagnostics in general.
Food industry gets more automated than ever
As “Lockdown” was named a word of the year in 2020, the HORECA industry was one of the first to suffer. It gave an impetus to advancement both in food-related technologies and business models.
At first, food delivery services became increasingly popular, and soon after that, cafes and restaurants felt a lack of professionally equipped cooking space needed to serve that level of demand. It forced the development of CloudKitchens that provides cooking space and needed infrastructure for cooks and restaurants who want or have to work with deliveries only.
A necessity of so-called ghost-kitchens united under several trustworthy brands also came from the consumers’ concerns related to the safety of delivered meals and products. It is only logical that in 2020 the market saw a steep increase in sales of UV-sterilizers, both portable, used by households, and commercial.
Delivery-model speeded up the every-day processes in the food sector, which required not only new safety measures, but also improvement in logistics. Now, companies around the world work on blockchain technologies, allowing more predictable and responsive supply chains, that rely more on bulletproof algorithms and less on manual planning and execution.
Hunter Food Study Special Report, reflecting changes in every-day cooking during pandemic, show that more than 50% of Americans claimed to enjoy cooking and having family meals more than previously. More than 44% of the research participants claimed to discover new ingredients and brands, 60% are looking for simpler solutions and for creative usage of ingredients in hand, almost and 50% would like to eat healthier and try completely new foods.
While different technologies are introduced in food and horeca industries to face the challenges of pandemic, Moley Robotic Kitchen answers top-demands of households and commercial kitchens. It minimizes human participation in the process to bare minimum, allows to taste a variety of dishes from all over the world, disinfects cooking area and air, and enhances sustainability of supply process, analyzing shelf life of products and minimizing food waste.
XR-Technologies take over new spheres
X reality is defined by Wikipedia as a form of “mixed reality environment that comes from the fusion (union) of ubiquitous sensor/actuator networks and shared online virtual worlds. In short — it is a new cross reality that received a huge impetus due to lockdowns in 2020. XR is a technological solution that covers all forms of computer-assisted reality, including augmented reality (AR), mixed reality and virtual reality (VR). It significantly improves the quality, accuracy and dimension of human-computer interaction.
Covid-19 increased the number of people using VR-headsets and the number of companies implementing AR technologies to make customer’s journeys better and more fun. Businesses and governmental institutions use VR/AR to teach their employees faster and more efficiently — AR/VR programs simulate real-world situations, giving workers the opportunity to gain experience even when working from home. Museums and theaters adopt AR/R technologies to lure more “visitors” deprived of cultural experience due to the quarantine.
Computing giants create and update VR-classrooms, helping schools around the world not to lower the level of education. For example, In China, during the first pandemic wave, 23.8 percent of all virtual and augmented reality devices were used in education.
While not many schools and households can afford the whole VR-ecosystems, many VR-schooling solutions include a simpler browser version.
COVID-19 outbreak is causing widespread economic hardship and uncertainty for consumers, businesses and communities across the globe. Pursuing technological innovation in the spheres related to fighting pandemic and its consequences becomes a perspective solution for many companies.
