The ongoing severity virus pandemic always stimulates the changing, especially in the technology that can assist us to increase expedience and prevent from various risks. It’s true that technology has been developing and used widely before the outbreak occurred, but technology specialists forecast that these technologies will continually be used and play more and more important roles in daily life despite the end of COVID-19.
Here, there are ten eye-catching technologies that will be more flexible for people, work, education, innovation, as well as entertaining media. These technologies include:
Online Shopping and Robot Deliveries
Shopping platforms has been changed since the pandemic of SARS in 2002,when many platforms for goods purchasing had originated. Also, it had been a path of new opportunities for diminishing the risks when people go shopping outside. Many businesses, which adopt the models of ‘a nice-to-have’ online platforms, have switched to ‘a must-to-have’ as the COVID-19 outbreak stimulates online shopping to become more popular. Accordingly, online shopping needs a complete support from ‘logistics’ for effective adaptations.
Digital and Contactless Payments
Encouraging people to use contactless businesses, digital payment or E-payment overcomes the anxiety of people who are previously unfamiliar with cashless, making them open their mind to learn more about it. Using digital payment allows customers to easily purchase online products, payment services, and other utility expenses. Although people tend to use E-wallet, the World Bank mentions that some people are still out of digital approach which means they cannot access the internet.
Remote Work
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, only a small percentage of companies had tried the remote method. However, the situation forced them to sort out struggling and surviving themselves and their company. Similarly, remote work has led our society into the world of more advanced technology because of work requires a lot of technologies such as Virtual Private Network (VPN),Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIPs), virtual conferencing via programs, cloud technology, collaboration tools, and facial recognition, etc.
Nevertheless, remote work methods also have some challenges such as the problems of communication and loneliness. American psychologists assure that there are an increasing number of people who have encountered psychotic symptoms in the work-from-home period. Moreover, many working people have difficulty balancing work and rest.
Distance Learning
Since the middle of last April, schools and universities from 191 countries around the world had announced temporary shutdowns. This affects approximately 1.57 billion students. Accordingly, the online classes responded to the pain point because the crisis pandemic has dragged on for too long. Thus, hours of adaptation during online instruction must be technology support such as internet network, Virtual Reality (VR), 3Dprinting and Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc.
Telehealth
Telemedicine technology is quite responsive and now available for deployment due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Besides, Telemedicine can reduce the risk of infection. Patients have more comfortable access to the physicians without transportation.
The technologies that are applied with Telehealth include IoT, internet-linked device, Chatbots that can provide initial diagnosis, AI technology working with Big Data through medical information systems and image analysis, as well as 5Gtechnology that will enable more real-time treatment.
In Asia, Taiwan has popular medical companies, such as Leadtek Research Inc, which has created physical and mental check platforms through Amor brand bracelets. Amor helps tracking sleeping records, fatigue index, life circle index, and physical stress index through AI technology which analyzes personal trends and provides effective recommendations.
According to eClinicalWorks, the number of TeleVisits’ users on April 6 was 1.5 million compared to March 16 which was approximately 100,000users. It means that it had increased 15 times in the last three weeks.
Online Entertainment
For a long period of quarantine, this creates many digital activities. Concert Streaming is one of the digital activities which is extremely trendy around the world including in Thailand. In addition, the creator movie company in China releases movie online content in order to fulfill audience’s needs in their quarantine. Moreover, museum and the world heritage sites are also have online visiting which is called "virtual tour”.
Supply Chain 4.0
After the spread of COVID-19, the world economy has changed. Many companies in the world have to adapt their warehouse from one main distribution center to many distribution centers to others instead. The new type of distribution center has highly flexible attribution, and it utilizes many technologies such as Big Data, Cloud computing, Internet-of-Thing (IoT), and Blockchain to increase the accuracy of goods information, calculate the shipping time, and estimate the procedure and the damage of goods during shipping.
3D printing
3D printing helps us spend less time generating products, and provides the flexibility of the production process. Nowadays, many countries apply 3D printing to produce Face Shield and Ventilator. Furthermore, 3D printing is able to help the medical staff to learn more accurately about muscle and bone systems through those 3D models.
Robotic and Drones
COVID-19 motivates a lot of businesses such as restaurants, logistics or the businesses which need a lot of labors to bring robot and drones in applying for facilitating the human’s life.
In the past few months, the rate of utilizing robots to deliver food and other goods in hospitals for people who are quarantining has been increasing. In addition, some researchers give their opinion on this issue that in the future after this pandemic, robots might replace human labor in some kinds of work.
Drones, the technology used in many countries, have a lot of advantages such as capturing photos to estimate some circumstances, delivering food, following the terrorists, estimating the quality of the surface of soil, and investigating the construction site.
5G and ICT
5G is different from 4G in terms of speed, latency, and the connection with IoT. Everything in our life may be virtually altered to a smart thing including ICT which helps systematically and accurately manage the information before processing.
