The Technologies that save Lives in the age of COVID-19

Every industry in the world today are putting technology to work to alleviate the effects of the global SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic and health crisis. With the help of current and emerging technological solutions today, we have avoided an unmanageable crisis such as ones brought by the 1918 flu pandemic.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

December 31, 2019 when the World Health Organization (WHO) received the first report of a suspected novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in Wuhan. On January 30, 2020, WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern under the International Health Regulations (IHR). By this time China is already using the power of Aritificial Intelligence (AI) systems in alerting the spread of the virus. Through the help of data analytics and predictive models, medical professionals are able to understand the deadly virus more. Baidu, the Chinese Internet provider, made its Linearfold algorithm available to the medical teams fighting the outbreak. Compared to Ebola, HIV and Influenza, COVID-19 is said to have a single strand RNA, so it is able to rapidly mutate. The Linearfold algorithm is a lot faster than other algorithms that help predict the structure of a virus.

Alibaba, on the other hand, also developed a Cloud-based Coronavirus diagnosis tool that claims is more than 96% accurate and takes less than 20 seconds to work.

AI-powered scans have been increasingly used in hospitals to help doctors diagnose diseases. These routines and practices of AI being used today against COVID-19 indicates possibilities of advanced health care technology in the future. Although still a long way to go, what we are experiencing today is a huge factor in enriching health care technology through AI.

Drones

As of today, public health and safety officials all over the globe are now using drones to monitor public spaces and to enforce social distancing regulation to help slow down the spread of COVID-19. Other helpful use of drones today, especially on severely affected areas, were transporting medical equipment and patient samples. Agricultural drones were spraying disinfectants especially large areas or places that are difficult to access. According to an article published by The World Economic Forum, Justin Gong, the co-founder of XAG drone company, states that “Depending on the use, spraying with drones can be 50 times more efficient than spraying done by people.”

Two years ago, AWTG also started working with unmanned drone command and control UAVs with mostly for 5G development. As stated on Ian Vernon’s previous blogpost, “This resulted to AI-based command and control of drone flights, which we (AWTG) now utilised for field inspection, security and safety application, rapid emergency response. These innovations are being developed further to enable AI-based control and management of drone flights, starting with private and public enterprises and hopefully integrated to a nationwide system on.”

Hopefully, these UAV / Drone technology will help with the progress of fighting COVID-19, extending help to the human capacity.

Robotics

Robots today are now considered frontliners in fighting COVID-19. They are now widely used on spraying disinfectants, dispensing hand sanitizers, preparing meals and many more other to mention. Even on advanced health care hospitals, robotics is now being used to perform diagnosis and conduct thermal imaging.

On an article published by Forbes, they listed down 10 examples of robots helping to fight COVID-19 and help people out of high-risk situations. Among of the robotics on the list were robotics helping out contactless transactions on grocery stores and making speedier shopping experience or helping out with the disinfecting and cleaning.

Autonomous Vehicles

Beverages sit inside a Neolix autonomous vending-machine vehicle in Changzhou, China. © 2019 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP

Like drones, autonomous vehicle is now playing a key decisive part on helping out humans on some of the high-risk jobs. They proved to be useful by being used as a delivery tool for essential goods like medicines and food items.

Among some companies that instigate the use of autonomous vehicles were Idriverplus, a Chinese self-driving company that operates electric street cleaning vehicles and Neolix that delivers supplies and food to big hospitals in Beijing.

AWTG also played its part on contributing on the Autonomous and Connected Vehicle technology as we participated on the launch of AutoAir 5G Testbed last February 2019 which features the potential of 5G through data transmission to fast-moving vehicles by streaming live 4K videos at network speed of 1Gbps.

Contact Tracing and Work Place Distancing

Despite the ongoing lockdown and skeletal workforce scheme, AWTG team continues to find ways on how we can contribute in helping out health and other industries fight this 2020 pandemic we are facing. Through our continuous efforts of finding and innovating new technologies, we came up with a new device and solution that might be of huge help to every industry. It’s main features in essence is to make ‘social distancing’ the new normal inside a work place.

iWPS or Intelligent Work Place Solution is a device and application where it enables safe and secure working environment. Meaning, it ensures that physical distance is maintained by the employees through its immediate audible and vibrating alarm when security distance is not followed.

While health care industry is working big time on flattening the curve, AWTG’s own aid to support is through contact tracing via iWPS technology. If two or more devices are below the security distance, the system records the interactions (time and date of event) for 14 days in order to track “at risk” contacts, allowing the company to encourage selective self-isolation measures avoid massive business closures.

Parting words..

Combine all these technologies mentioned above, we hope to make life safer to the rest of the world while the brave frontliners and great minds are able to find the vaccine. Through this blogpost, we also would like to take the opportunity to thank all front liners around the globe for not giving up and continue to battle this deadly virus.