The global pandemic aka Covid-19 changes the world in many ways. Finally, the never-ending debate comes to an end, whether technology is good or bad. Today, we will discuss some technologies that helped us during the pandemic.
We see the implementation of medical treatment with the usage of technology. Here, we are talking about the telemedicine service that got popularity since last year. Nowadays, many third-party companies offer doctor-patient video chats throughout the world. In this way, both the doctors and the patients feel safe. We also see no-contact-based medication delivery, AI (Artificial Intelligence) based diagnostics and so on. This telehealth industry got a 50% boost up if you compare with the pre-pandemic levels. Back in 2019, IHS (Information Handling Services) Technology predicted that 70 million Americans would use telehealth by the year 2020. Surprisingly, it has crossed that limit according to Forrester Research.
Online education becomes a part of our learning mechanism. During the pandemic, almost 190+ countries had closed their schools at some point. It directly affects almost 1.6 billion people globally. Only one option was left then and that was e-learning. So, most of the schools, colleges, universities, and even the coaching centers grab this opportunity and resume their teaching process online. We also see some institutions continue their classes online even after everything goes to normal. Apart from our local institutions, platforms like Coursera, Udacity, Byju’s, etc. have served the global students during the lockdown period.
Then, technology is heavily used for remote working and video conferencing now. If we look at the application named Zoom, it grew up from a startup back in 2011. It goes public in 2019 and became viral in 2020. We also see the widespread usages of similar tools like Teams (Microsoft), Google Meet (Google), Webex (Cisco) and so on. All of them provide the state-of-the-art of video conferencing systems and facilitate remote work access around the world. Besides, some offices went back to our traditional office system and a photoelectric smoke detector will be a wise investment for them.
On the contrary, contactless delivery is the new normal. Due to the outbreak of Coronavirus, this contactless delivery or contactless shipping has gained huge popularity. The USA has seen a 20 percent increase in preference for contactless delivery. Almost all the major companies offer contactless delivery now. Companies like Postmates, Instacart, DoorDash reported that almost 80% of the orders they served in the last eight months was contactless. Food delivery chains like Uber Eats, Grubhub, Foodpanda also offer contactless delivery while ordering. Also, contactless delivery can be optimized using a fast route planner app to get the best routes.
Wuhan is the first place where coronavirus spotted at first. A China-based delivery apps named Meituan was successful to implement the idea of contactless delivery even in Wuhan. They used autonomous vehicles to serve grocery orders to the customers of that region.
Finally, this pandemic shows us how important modern technology is. Like other things, it has some bad impacts as well. It completely depends on the user whether we use it for our benefit or not.
