If 2020 taught us anything other than how to bake our bread, it‘s that our tools for monitoring and preventing the spread of infectious diseases are lacking. The COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe and left governments and officials scrambling to respond.
This may be the first global pandemic in most of our lifetimes, but it isn’t the first example of a lack of real-time forecasting, monitoring and prevention strategies having detrimental effects. This has spurred a push toward the creation of new technology that might help prevent or at least prepare us for the next pandemic or widespread infection.
What new technologies can we expect to see emerging in the next decade or so as we work to keep the world‘s population healthy and prevent a repeat of 2020?
Wearable Technology Finds Its Place in Medicine
Wearable technology isn’t necessarily new, with brands like Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung and Apple all dipping their metaphorical toes in the pool, but advances in wearable technology turn them from casual step trackers into viable medical tools.
Apple took the first step here by turning their Apple Watch into a single-lead ECG late in 2018. The 2020 pandemic had medical professionals around the globe exploring whether the data collected by the millions of wearables used daily could provide viable diagnostic data to help diagnose and treat COVID-19.
While they currently are not a replacement for a trip to the doctor, wearable technology has become an invaluable tool for tracking and diagnosing things like the coronavirus and will continue to do so in the coming years.
Big Data To Help With Contact Tracing
Contract tracing is essential when dealing with something like a global pandemic, but contact tracing generates massive amounts of data with nearly 8 billion people in the world. Too much for any team of people to sort through or turn into viable and actionable information.
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of potential applications for big data as it applies to infectious disease tracking and prevention, but as we start to understand the impact that it can have on global health, we will likely see new techniques and technologies emerge.
Virtual Healthcare to Prevent Disease Transmission
Telehealth and virtual healthcare is another technology that wasn’t necessarily new as we entered 2020, but it’s one that exploded as people were looking for ways to stay in touch with their doctors and therapists without leaving home, breaking lockdown, or putting themselves at risk of contracting COVID-19.
Trips to the doctor’s office in certain circumstances will still be necessary, but for regular checkups or disciplines like psychology and psychiatry where the patients don’t necessarily need to be in the office, telehealth will continue to grow and thrive.
This can also help support the green healthcare movement by reducing the number of unnecessary trips that thousands of people take every single year, thereby helping to shrink the industry’s carbon footprint.
AI and Machine Learning to Predict Instead of Prevent
Feed an AI or machine learning system enough information, and eventually, it will be able to use that data to make predictions. The more data it has, the more accurate these predictions will become.
AI analytics made an appearance in the US during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic as a tool to predict cases and deaths over a couple of months. It has been a valuable tool as we’ve learned to navigate this pandemic, but in the future, it could also help to predict emerging viruses before they reach pandemic status.
The Rise Of Contactless Services
Once the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that COVID-19 was spreading from person to person, people started trying to stay as far apart as possible.
Businesses that stayed opened installed barriers to separate customers from employees and implemented deep-cleaning and sterilization strategies to prevent the virus from lingering on surfaces. Many companies also took steps to make their service contactless, whether that meant giving people the option to have their takeout left at the door or employing things like drones and autonomous vehicles.
While things are starting to go back to normal, contactless services and the technologies that support them will continue to grow in popularity in the coming years.
Keeping People Healthy is a Full-Time Job
The COVID-19 pandemic caught a lot of the world flat-footed and left them scrambling. We’ve coped and learned how to respond, so now we need to look forward and figure out how best to prevent this sort of global event from happening again.
