COVID-19 and Touchless Innovation
The Coronavirus is scary. There’s no doubt about it. It’s a virus that’s spreading relatively quickly and has taken off like fast growing applications such as Tik Tok and similar social aspects. The issue seems to have thrown China into a frenzy and caused disarray across the board. We’re seeing closures of stores by brands such as Apple and Starbucks. Not to mention factory closures connected to brands such as Tesla, Apple, and even Nintendo. Finally, quarantined areas also point to a slowdown in economic activity causing financial hits to income sheets of a wide swath of Fortune 500 companies, including companies like Disney.
But even while these fears rage on, the markets continue to climb upward. This optimism is present across the the equity and cryptocurrency markets as well. Anyone notice that tech companies are hitting new highs while bitcoin, followed by ethereum and other coins like litecoin continue to run in in a positive direction?
But I digress, let’s get back to the coronavirus or COVID-19.
The website, Worldometers notes that there’s been 45,208 coronavirus cases thus far. Total reported deaths are 1,118.
While officials may report that COVID-19 has relatively low mortality rates, we know that it may have after affects that linger for sometime.
Its an issue that needs to be addressed and necessity is the mother of invention.
COVID-19 and Touchless Innovation
You don’t really do anything novel unless there is a compelling need to do so. COVID-19 compels you to minimize contact and exposure of any sort to environments where COVID-19 resides. So what do you do if you’re a problem solver? You look at ways to implement touchless technology. Creating and deploying such an innovation would be welcome in these trying times.
Balaji. Srinivasan, a technology expert and entrepreneur, recently shared a tweet that shows potential touchless technology.
Chinese engineer with a prototype of a touchless button.
Could be used for elevators and other contexts as part of the hygiene 2.0 movement that is already informally underway in Asia as a result of this crisis. https://t.co/CsOIqFyq0k
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) February 12, 2020
While this is just one aspect of the technology of proximity sensing, in “no contact elevator buttons”, we know that other technologies such as voice would also be compelling in these times. It will be interesting to see different innovations that come about to minimize contact with physical surfaces.Gesture technologies and the like are innovations that we’ve seen in movies but they may appear sooner than later due to events such as these.
At the same time, the video above is just a prototype and an experiment. Nothing has been implemented as of yet but all progress starts with initial steps.