Internet of Things - A Missed Opportunity in the Fight Against COVID-19

Sean Byrne, CEO and President, Cortex Technologies Corporation

Sean Byrne, CEO and President, Cortex Technologies Corporation

It was 1999 when the phrase “Internet of Things” was born, invented by Kevin Ashton, a Proctor & Gamble employee, for a presentation he was giving to persuade the company to use RFID tags in their supply chain. Twenty-two years later, in the second year of a global pandemic that has already claimed over three million lives, and one can’t help but imagine how much better we might have responded to and recovered from the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, had the adoption of IOT technology moved at a similar paceto other technology trends. Today, world-wide smart home penetration sits at barely 10% (^1), while Facebookhas managed to achieve nearly 40% saturation of the world’s population in just thirteen years (^2).

Even Ashton’s dream of a globally connected supply chain network still isn’t fully realized, although most of the technology challenges needed to affordably do it have been addressed. The concept of “smart cities” remains a pet-project of wealthy cities like Singapore, and a distant pipedream of the not-so-wealthy cities like Manila. The intrinsic benefits of IOT’s,such as the tracking, identifying, and authenticatingof “things”, would have been an immeasurable benefit in the fight against COVID-19, particularly given the long incubation period the virus has and therefore the importance of contact tracing in the early days of the outbreak. This could have offered governments vital data that would have guided them in quickly isolating and containing COVID-19.

In the residential setting, truly smart homes could have been a lifeline for the billions isolated under home quarantine for months (and in some cases, for over a year),

especially for those with medical conditions that require ongoing monitoring by a doctor or by family members. Air quality monitoring, physical security, home automation and important health requirements could have been addressed at scale by existing IOT technology, but sadly the best that most countries could offer was primitive forms of telemedicine.

Smartphones turned out to be effective in evaluating stay-at-home regulations in some countries but lacked other useful dimensions of data necessary for them to play a more critical role in assessing and informing individuals about their possible COVID status, mostly due to an understandable sensitivity around emerging technology and personal privacy.

Wearables, on the other hand, should have been the star of this pandemic, offering location, temperature, pulse, and respiratory monitoring that couldhave identifiedif an individual were potentially COVID-positive and notifying them to quarantine and undergo further testing. The same data could have been aggregated to monitor the spread of the disease, measure the effectiveness of control protocols, and even cross-checked with other data for rapid mass contact-tracing. The same technology could also have been used to enforce home isolation, mitigating the need for government-controlled facilities, and allowing people to isolate at home with loved ones.

This is not to say that IOT was completely absent from this pandemic, but that its range, scope, and accessibility was so small as to be barely detectable amidst the 160 million cases. We need to take the steps necessary to ramp up the adoption of this technology and give us a better fighting chance when the next pandemic comes.