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7 kinds of tech that rose with COVID-19

As the pandemic took off, certain tech seemingly custom-made for the quarantined masses appeared to be poised for greatness.

Zoom was booming. Pelaton was racing. Netflix was chill.

The promising early days, however, eventually turned into stock-market disappointment when those companies suffered reversals as stay-home orders were lifted.

But the pandemic did energize forms of tech that seem to be here to stay. They’re broader and less flashy than the former consumer-tech darlings listed above. But it looks like they’ll long be influencing the way we live, from how we feed ourselves to how we talk to our doctors.

Here’s a look at the tech winners.

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Online learning
More than 1.2 billion children exited classrooms during the pandemic, according to the World Economic Forum.

As with the other technologies listed here, edtech was on the upswing well before the virus struck, with Market Insider reporting on U.S.$18.66 billion in investments in 2019 and U.S.$16.34 billion the year before. But the COVID-19 crisis put the need into overdrive as schools closed around the world and families struggled to adapt to at-home learning at an unprecedented scale.

Researchers are now getting a picture of the consequences of the disruption. In one study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the University of Oxford’s Per Engzell and his team found that students generally made little to no progress studying from home, and students from disadvantaged homes lost ground.

But some experts say e-learning will continue to gain strength in – and out of –classrooms.

Barbara B. Lockee of the Virginia Tech School of Education in commentary for Nature says the future is hybrid, with teachers supporting pedagogical approaches from a menu of options. Other changes she sees continuing: flexible assignment deadlines; more student choice about learning methods; and experiences that involve meaningful applications of new skills, such as collaborative projects that require creative and social-media tools.

Charlotte Coles

Charlotte Coles, head of content for THE’s Digital Universities Series, which produces industry conferences on the subject around the world, is also bullish about e-learning’s future at the university level, but has a caveat.

“As technology continues to advance, e-learning has become an integral part of the higher education curriculum combining synchronous and asynchronous communication and supporting greater knowledge transfer,” she tells KUST Review.

“The benefits of e-learning are numerous and will allow institutions to build customizable learning environments that enable individual learning styles to flourish in a cost-effective way. However, concerns around student digital poverty and faculty digital skills are some of the barriers that must be addressed in order to guarantee widespread adoption.”

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Food delivery
Food delivery was available before the pandemic, of course, but it’s getting harder to find restaurants that don’t list themselves on delivery apps now as more people consider meal delivery less treat and more daily necessity. Newfoodmagazine.com says the apps may well redefine the meaning of “restaurant,” with sit-down locations now operating like food trucks or delivery-only takeaway.

In a paper published by the European Journal of Management and Business Economics, researchers suggest that an increase in cheaper smart devices, rapidly improving telecommunications infrastructure, increased purchasing power and decreased personal time have combined to create the perfect conditions for the food-delivery boom.

German marketing company Statista says the UAE is the second largest market for food delivery in the MENA region, with an annual market size of U.S.$834 million. Meanwhile, IT service-management company Network International cites reports that GCC restaurants have begun using cloud kitchens – commercial kitchens that prepare food for delivery and takeaway only – and aggregator platforms to launch new brands.

But restaurant deliveries are just part of the picture. Grocery delivery also skyrocketed during the pandemic, with Amazon profits alone experiencing nearly 200 percent growth, mostly due to food purchases.

And a 2021 paper published in Current Developments in Nutrition cites a survey that found that 60 percent of those who ordered groceries during the pandemic intended to continue shopping that way.

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Online shopping
People want their dinners delivered with a few keystrokes, and everything else, too.

A United Nations Conference on Trade and Development study titled “COVID-19 and E-Commerce” looked at the buying habits of nine nations during the pandemic and concluded that the changes are likely to linger for some time.

The study covered Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, the Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, South Africa, Switzerland and Turkey and found that more than half of respondents shop online more and look more often to the internet for their news, entertainment and health information.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards a more digital world. The changes we make now will have lasting effects as the world economy begins to recover,” says UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi.

In the UAE, a 2022 Statista survey says 48 percent of respondents maintained their pre-COVID online-shopping habits, while 32 percent say they shopped more online after the pandemic.

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Customer service
As the world turned to online shopping, consumers also pivoted toward online channels to conduct daily business.

Global management-consulting firm McKinsey and Co. says the COVID-19 crisis accelerated the digitization of customer services by several years: by three years in North America and Europe and four years in the Asia-Pacific region. McKinsey also cites a survey that says respondents are three times as likely now as before the pandemic to say that 80 percent of their customer interactions occur in the digital space.

Research and advisory company Forrester says consumer attitudes toward digital channels are  changing, with customers showing a marked preference for communicating with support teams via messaging.

Calabrio, which produces workplace software, however, says voice calls also increased during the pandemic, with customer-service agents taking 7.2 more calls a day. This takes a toll. A Cornell study says 87 percent of call center agents report high or very high levels of stress on the job.

But AI may be stepping up to help the embattled humans on the other side of the line.

Indian software company Mantra Labs says AI could be most useful providing services like answering FAQs and giving basic customer support. And unlike the old interactive voice response systems that had us shouting into our cellphones, modern AI systems will feel like you’re talking to a human.

AI technologies entering the customer-service ring include chatbots; agent assist to interpret what the customer wants, search relevant articles and display the information on the human agent’s screen; self-service functions that give customers the tools to solve their own issues; robotic process automation to automate simple tasks for agents; and machine learning to support agents with predictive analytics.

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Digital payments
People are buying more online and looking for touch-free options when they shop at brick-and-mortar stores, so it stands to reason that digital payments are also seeing a boost.

The World Bank says the pandemic also spurred a wave of financial inclusion that fuels the trend. Among the reasons: In low- and middle-income economies (excluding China) more than 40 percent of adults who bought something in a store or online with a card, phone or the internet had never done so before the pandemic.

Two-thirds of the world’s adults now make or receive digital payments, the World Bank says.

The digital transition was coming well before the virus shut down the world, but lockdowns accelerated the process.

According to a 2021 Visa survey of business owners and customers in eight countries, 47 percent said they wouldn’t even shop at a store that didn’t offer contactless payment.

Customers might have come for the health protection, but it looks like they’ll stay for the convenience.

“As countries around the world continue to increase tap-to-pay transaction limits, contactless payments are here to stay and their adoption will accelerate,” Rajat Taneja, president of technology at Visa, tells CNBC.

Touchless digital transactions at first required a customer to tap their card, rather than swipe it through a reader. But many customers now use digital wallets on their phones or digital apps such as Apple Pay.

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Cloud computing
The skies are blue for cloud computing – using a network of remote servers hosted by the internet to store, manage and process data instead of using a local server or a personal computer.

Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft together have invested almost U.S.$120 billion recently in cloud computing, most of it spent on data centers and servers, the Economist reports.

Global sales for the cloud-computing industry were expected to exceed U.S.$495 billion in 2022, according to research firm Gartner.

Although many industries are embracing cloud computing, the industries investing the most in the technology are manufacturing, retail, government, health care and agriculture, according to Brazilian service and software provider Stefanini.

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Health care
In 2019, 840,000 medical visits covered by the U.S. Medicare Part B program were televisits, patient-to-provider communications that include video and phone calls, chatbots and portal messages. In 2020 that number leaped to 52.7 million, according to researchers in the U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation. Of these visits, 92 percent occurred in patients’ homes, which generally wasn’t allowed before the pandemic.

The American federal health-care system is tightening up rules for telehealth reimbursement, but Dr. Julia Shaver in a paper for Prim Health says that although future studies should be conducted to determine the best use for the technology, it will remain an integral part of medical care.

Like telehealth services, wearables also saw a boost of interest during the pandemic.

Researchers studying the issue in a paper for Sensors say it makes sense: Wearables are passive and practical, able to monitor patients continuously with little to no input from users; they can be used in remote or inpatient settings; and they provide objective measurements providing real-time feedback to patients and doctors.

Wearables encompass such tech as fitness trackers to biosensors in patches. Among COVID-specific projects, wearables were tapped to spot signs of infections when test kits were in short supply.

And GlobalData, a data analytics and consulting company based in London, projects the industry to boom, increasing from U.S.$59 billion in 2020 to $156 billion by 2024.

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Polluted oceans:
Let the trash take itself out

Up to 12.7 million tons of waste makes its way into the world’s oceans each year, forming massive “plastic islands” in oceanic gyres and devastating birds and marine life in the process.

Cleanup, in which plastics are currently collected at sea, stored and shipped to shore for disposal, is estimated to take from 50 to 130 years with annual costs expected by some at nearly US $37 million. In the meantime, the trash is degrading faster than it can be gathered, disintegrating into harmful and even more difficult to mitigate microscopic forms.

Listen to the Deep Dive

Now a team of researchers from Massachusetts in the United States is suggesting a new approach: self-powered cleanup vessels that turn the trash they harvest from the seas into the fuel they use for the job.

RELATED: Microplastics: The invisible threat

The “blue diesel”-powered ships could reduce the amount of fuel and roundtrips needed to remove ocean waste, the researchers write in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The researchers, representing Harvard University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, suggest using high temperatures and high pressure in a process called hydrothermal liquefaction to depolymerize the plastics into a harnessable energy, creating self-powered cleanup that eliminates the need to refuel or unload plastic waste and potentially reduces total cleanup times.

Of course, it isn’t enough to clean up the oceans faster and with less fuel waste. The world needs to address the amount of garbage that makes it into the oceans in the first place, the researchers write. “Reducing or eliminating the amount of plastic waste generated is critically important, especially when the current loading may persist for years to even decades,” they say.

 COVID’s toll on the oceans 

Meanwhile, researchers from China’s School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego say the COVID-19 pandemic is making an already bad situation in the oceans even worse.

Also writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the scientists say that of the 8 million tons of plastic waste generated until recently in the fight against the virus, about 25,000 tons of medical waste, mostly from hospitals, has entered the world’s oceans. And more is expected to come, not only damaging marine species but potentially spreading contaminants including the COVID-19 virus.

The hospital trash, they say, dwarfs the amount of waste from discarded personal-protective equipment (PPEs) and plastic packaging produced by a surge of online shopping in the wake of the pandemic. For a little perspective, the authors cite another study estimating that 1.56 million face masks made it to the oceans in 2020.

Plastics that wash into the oceans are endangering wildlife. IMAGE: Shutterstock

Five of the top six rivers associated with medical-waste discharge are in Asia (Shatt al Arab, Indus, Yangtze,Ganges Brahmaputra and Amur). The other, the Danube, is in Europe.

The authors call for increased public awareness of plastics’ environmental impacts; better collection, treatment and recycling of plastic waste; and improved waste-management practices at pandemic epicenters, particularly in developing countries.

 Microbots to the rescue? 

A solution to microplastics in water might come in an equally small package: microbots.

The bacterium-size bots when added to water with a little hydrogen peroxide attach to microscopic bits of plastic and begin to break them down. The research was recently published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“They can sweep a much larger area than you would be able to touch with stationary technology,” says study co-author Martin Pumera, a researcher at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague.

Pumera envisions setting the microbots loose in the oceans to collect microplastics, but Win Cowger, an expert in plastic pollution at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study, tells Scientific American that closed systems such as those for drinking-water or wastewater treatment would probably be better potential targets.

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Civil planning in the age of pandemics

COVID-19 was not the first pandemic to force changes in how we live: Communicable diseases have transformed urban planning before.

The Black Death outbreak in 14th century Europe saw narrow public squares transformed into larger public spaces better integrated with nature. The cholera outbreak in 19th century London prompted improvements to water-management infrastructure. And during the Spanish flu, residents eschewed cramped public transport in favor of walking in uncrowded streets.

Many of the practices in architectural and urban design prevalent now have evolved from similar measures taken throughout history to safeguard the health, hygiene and comfort of city dwellers. Now, researchers are turning their attention to suburbia.

Cities have to learn how to balance the competing demands of social distancing, preserving the economy and promoting people’s well-being.

– Khaled Alawadi

The team from Khalifa University says accessibility and walkability are crucial aspects for pandemic-proofing neighborhoods. The findings, published in Sustainable Cities and Society, suggest suburbs can provide better pedestrian accessibility with the right combination of structure and design.

Future pandemics may bring more lockdowns, says Khaled Alawadi, associate professor in the KU Department of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering, and open spaces will be vital.

“Cities have to learn how to balance the competing demands of social distancing, preserving the economy and promoting people’s well-being. … We argue that suburban design in the post-pandemic era should facilitate a balanced density level that is higher than the suburban norm but lower than that of traditional compact cities.”

A heavy Western influence

Despite the vast majority of the population continuing to reside in suburbs, retrofitting efforts to promote walkability and transit-oriented development are mostly limited to city centers. In GCC countries and the UAE in particular, suburbanization is the dominant development trend: suburbs occupy more than 50 percent of Abu Dhabi’s urbanized land and 40 percent of Dubai’s urban area.

Because suburbs are likely to continue to be the primary features of urban development, the researchers argue that suburban design should be rethought, instead of vilified, discarded or ignored. Their work integrates morphological mapping, urban-network analysis and forgotten urban-form elements such as alleys into designing future suburban areas. They focused on neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, examining the structural and physical layouts of both cities that resemble neighborhood typologies common in Western cities.

The grids and fragmented layouts that comprise the diverse set of neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi and Dubai are the same applied in city planning around the world.

– Khaled Alawadi

“Both cities have a history of inviting and hiring consulting firms and foreign architects who were all trained in Western countries,” Alawadi says. “The grids and fragmented layouts that comprise the diverse set of neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi and Dubai are the same applied in city planning around the world.”

The need to rethink suburban design stemmed from the need to confront climate change, long before the emergence of the novel coronavirus. Suburbs have been harshly criticized for their social, economic and environmental impact, and in terms of physical planning ideals, one of the key criticisms is low pedestrian accessibility.

Detached, single-family housing — the primary form of the suburban landscape all over the world — has either been glorified as the icon of the American dream of vilified as a deplorable built environment, but the KU team argues suburbia should not be visualized as sprawling low-density settlements only.

“The potential to design suburbs in various forms and levels of density cannot be overlooked,” Alawadi says. “For example, new suburbs can be designed to feature interconnected street systems rather than fragmented and broken street networks. Accessibility plays a vital role in good urban form. Residents are more likely to walk or cycle when their local area is more accessible and the distance between origins and destinations is shorter.”

Increasing accessibility

Accessibility and mobility go hand in hand: Mobility can be defined simply as how far you can go in a given amount of time, whereas accessibility is how easily one can get there. Research shows that, at neighborhood scale, accessibility has a significant influence on urban living, spatial equity, public health and walkability.

Comparing Abu Dhabi with Dubai, the researchers found that Dubai is more accessible overall but particularly when its network of alleys is considered. This suggests that better accessibility can be achieved by linking street networks with alleys between buildings.

“Walking within neighborhoods for recreational, fitness and utilitarian purposes is indispensable in a post-pandemic world,” Alawadi says. “The COVID-19 pandemic revived old debates in urban planning but there is an almost unanimous consensus regarding the need for walkable neighborhoods in post-pandemic cities. People want easy access to outdoor spaces, public parks and other destinations to meet their daily needs. Redesigned suburbs with more suitable infrastructure for local accessibility have the potential to serve as a viable housing option for the post-pandemic world.”

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The next generation of face masks
might diagnose disease as well

People around the world wore masks in their daily lives during the pandemic to help prevent infection. Now, a new kind of mask might help diagnose illness.

Engineers from MIT and Harvard say their new prototype can produce a COVID-19 test result in 90 minutes.

The wearer breathes normally into the mask, and droplets produced by exhaling and coughing collect on a pad. The wearer then presses a button to activate the test. A small bit of water is released, flowing through the pad and rehydrating freeze-dried cells that react to the presence of coronavirus markers.

After about 90 minutes, a colored line indicates whether the result is positive or negative. It looks like a pregnancy test.

The team uses a typical N95 mask and the results were published in Nature Biotechnology. This technology had been developed to detect other viruses such as Ebola. The MIT and Harvard teams have further plans for the technology.

CAPTION: The team uses a typical N95 mask.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can freeze-dry a broad range of synthetic biology sensors to detect viral or bacterial nucleic acids, as well as toxic chemicals, including nerve toxins. We envision that this platform could enable next-generation wearable biosensors for first responders, health-care personnel and military personnel,” MIT researcher James Collins tells  MIT news.