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Ram Awadh Prasad

The Global Pandemic of COVID 19 has taken the world by surprise. It is currently the biggest challenge not only to the Governments and Businesses across the world but also to the entire humanity. While crisis situations like this create disruptions and disaster, they also challenge us to find innovative solutions not only to overcome the crisis but also to open new avenues of growth never thought of earlier, and to be better prepared to manage such disasters in the future. In this blog, we will look at some of the toughest challenge areas and how technology can help us in dealing with these challenges in the face of crisis.

Inarguably, the biggest challenge is posed to Health Care and related services primarily due to unprecedented sheer volume of cases and by hostile work conditions leading to a risk of infection to the health care personnel themselves.

Here, technology can help by providing alternate options like Self-Assessment Platforms or Chatbots, Electronic Health Records, Online Consultation and Diagnosis and Smart Monitoring with the aid of IoT, to name a few. While these technologies cannot replace healthcare professionals, they can certainly reduce the burden on them and allow them to focus on more critical tasks.

Similarly, robotics augment safe sanitization practices, testing procedures, delivery of medicines etc. Predictive Analytics and AI can help to forecast growth of the epidemics to new areas based on travel data, electronic health records and demographics of the region, helping in better preparedness.

After healthcare, another critical area is eCommerce and maintaining the supply chain to ensure availability and delivery of essential as well as non-essential commodities. It is important to note that what may not seem essential in the short term may become essential or even critical in longer crises. Technology can help to maintain inventory at optimal levels, predicting demands and keep the supply chain running through modern tracking and monitoring solutions based on RFID and Bluetooth IoT. On the same lines, technology can help manufacturing and other industries with Remote Process Automation, Smart Connected Devices and Controls reducing human intervention and thereby aiding social distancing so crucial in such situations.

Banking is also one area where digital technologies are acting as an aid. With mobile banking apps and fintech players enabling digital transactions, loan management and investments, the need for visiting banks and use of paper currency has reduced. As noted by many governments, paper currency was considered a mode for viral transfer of COVID. But thanks to the digital platforms, the risk is minimized as people are preferring to use digital mode of payments. This also helps in reducing crowd at bank branches, thereby ensuring social distancing and protecting the banking workforce as well and also ensuring smooth banking operations.

Finally, effective communication and collaboration is critical to running most of the businesses. Communication and collaboration tools like team collaboration tools, video conferencing and virtual offices can ensure smooth collaboration. Equally important is to effectively track team productivity and employee health, morale and motivation which the collaboration tools along with Social Collaboration features enable.

Social Media platforms armed with AI technologies can help timely delivery of crucial information to the right target, preventing rumours on social media by filtering negative and possibly dangerous posts, gauging social sentiments and identifying hotspots.

To summarize, crisis situations like COVID-19, that cause a threat to humanity can be mitigated and often used to identify new opportunities by innovative and humanitarian use of modern technologies. These are difficult times and technology can be a tool to connect people digitally to create awareness, motivation and share insights.

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