5 Digital Health Technologies Helping to Stop the COVID-19 Pandemic

Taking the world by storm is the COVID-19 outbreak that has been affecting nearly every existing sector from the tech to tourism industries. The viral infection has been traveling across the globe at the speed of light, infecting more and more people day by day. Here are five digital health technologies helping to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
With human-to-human transmission confirmed, akin to the flu — only much worse — the WHO Director-General named the COVID-19 virus a pandemic. During this very real threat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended “ social distancing. ” The social distancing situation may go on for much longer than any of us can imagine — and has prompted a paradigm shift in the management, detection, and treatment of the COVID-19.
At the heart of all angles of the COVID-19 crises is digital health — and the technologies that are often dismissed as too futuristic to be implemented.
As researchers scramble to find cures, and health centers and governments race against time to contain the disease, we’ll take a look at how 5 of those futuristic digital health methods from artificial intelligence to robots that are being put in practice.
1. Artificial Intelligence: giving a head start in detecting spread and infection.
A Canadian company called BlueDot was the first to send the first alerts. Well before the CDC or the WHO issued warnings about the COVID-19 spread. What was BlueDot’s secret sauce detection? Artificial intelligence . BlueDot’s algorithm sifts through information about news reports, airline data, and reports of animal disease outbreaks to detect trends. Now, epidemiologists globally are analyzing these trends. As trends are analyzed, they alert the digital health company’s clients thereafter.
Healthcare professionals are also using A.I. at the forefront in diagnosing the COVID-19 infection. Chinese hospitals are already using such software to detect suspicious signs of lung infection caused by Coronavirus from radiologic scans.
The Chinese tech giant Alibaba also developed an AI solution to detect COVID-19 infections from CT scans of patients’ chests with 96% accuracy in a matter of seconds.
2. Telemedicine: remote healthcare.
While work-from-home has become the norm in many companies and even schools across the world under the thread of the COVID-19, healthcare facilities and personnel are also taking similar cues given their higher risk of infection when dealing with infected patients.
The Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in New Jersey launched a telemedicine service dedicated to screening patients for COVID-19 remotely. Both the CDC and WHO are further advocating for telemedicine to monitor patients and reduce risks of them spreading the virus by traveling to hospitals.
3. Robots in hospitals: the new aides for healthcare professionals.
Given the risk of...