Fighting the Pandemic with Technology

Healthcare and technology are obviously at the forefront of a lot people’s minds these days.  As a global pandemic continues to fundamentally alter life on Planet Earth, scientists and journalists are looking both forward and backward for answers as to what we could be doing to stem the tide and what we could have differently from the outset. China and South Korea have been using smartphone apps to help track the movements of infected persons and determine who and what they’ve been in contact with, a practice epidemiologists say has greatly contributed to the effectiveness of slowing the spread of the virus in those countries.  As parts of China are gradually returning to some semblance of normal life, government employees with temperature guns make sure you don’t have a fever before you walk into the grocery store or the hair salon.  Actions that might have seemed intrusive a few months ago seem like common-sense applications of technology to help curb the most widespread pandemic in over 100 years. What other ways are tech and big data helping in the world’s fight against the coronavirus?

Kinsa Health, a health technology company headquartered in San Francisco, CA, is using internet-connected smart thermometers to help track the spread of the virus. They’ve been using the same technology to help track the spread of the common flu for a few years, and have been able to predict when and where and the flu will migrate weeks ahead of the CDC’s own tracking apparatus. When abnormally large clusters of people in a defined area register fevers, the company can alert the relevant authorities of a possible outbreak. While having a fever might not necessarily indicate someone has been infected with the coronavirus, the flu data the company has collected over the years is invaluable in determining a baseline for what to expect during flu season. If the numbers seem unusually high in a given area, the chances of coronavirus being the culprit go up.

Photo Courtesy of Dyson

In the United Kingdom, futuristic vacuum cleaner and appliance manufacturer Dyson has committed to making 10,000 new ventilators for the NHS.  The ventilators are a new design which the company’s founder, James Dyson, claims to have designed and created in just 10 days after he received a call from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson requesting whatever assistance the company could provide. Dyson recently boasted the that the new device, the CoVent, “can be manufactured quickly, efficiently and at volume,” and is designed to address the specific needs of coronavirus patients. Ventilators are in very short supply worldwide – if Dyson’s new invention proves to be effective, mass manufacturing of the CoVent could save an inestimable number of lives.  American auto manufacturers like Ford, GM and Tesla have also pledged to help manufacture ventilators and other types of medical equipment and protective gear for healthcare workers.

We’ve already examined the union between big data and healthcare in this blog, but it’s worth taking a second look in the age of the coronavirus.  Could data-collecting health and fitness monitors like FitBits be the future of disease monitoring and prevention? If every single person on Earth were wearing a device that monitored things like his/her body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, and distributed that data to public health agencies, the mass diffusion of diseases like the coronavirus could become a thing of the past.  People all over the world might view connected health devices like Kinsa’s smart thermometers as an intrusion into their collective privacy, but if this global pandemic will teach us anything, it’s that cooperation on a global scale is necessary to prevent another pandemic in the future.  Technology has historically been a powerful force in both uniting and dividing us – it might ultimately be the key to helping the world heal itself and prevent another virus from doing similar harm going forward.