Post-Covid-19 trends: smarter tomorrow

After several countries successfully managed to mitigate their way through the pandemic, certain trends have emerged that started to manifest in 2020 and that will fully blossom and bloom in 2021 – where said post-COVID-19 trends will materialize.

The pandemic has impacted us is almost evert way possible. We now take a micro-inspection at how the pandemic has impacted remote work, mobile edge computing, and IoT.

Rise of Wearables in Remote Work

Albeit the pandemic has confined us to working from our bedrooms, kitchens, and sometimes bathrooms – the silver lining is that it has propelled certain technologies and proved their value for opening new use cases in the work environment.

A significant post-COVID-19 trend that we will be carrying in 2021 is the use of wearables in remote work. Wearables such as Augmented Reality (AR) smart glasses are currently basking in the sun when it comes to their development, deployment, and adoption.

These glasses work by capturing and processing a user’s physical environment and augmenting it with virtual elements – the possibilities are endless.

These Tony Stark-like glasses have opened up several avenues for remote work, more specifically when it comes to interactive remote communication allowing for document retrieval, real-time data capturing, and workflow instructions.

Edge Computing

While edge computing has been making steady strides, this will be the year where we fully realize this technology’s benefits and use.

Since public 5G is still not ready for mainstream adoption, experts foresee direct immediate value in private 5G – networks dedicated solely to business or locale such as warehouses, storages, factories, and even shipyards.

Furthermore, the advancement of 5G and mobile edge computing tech will open a platform for enterprise wearable devices to really bloom. Smart glasses can allow for workers to perform tasks hands-free, all while having access to the tools, information, and resources they may need.

IoT and Medicine

With the Internet of Things (IoT) in the medical world being on everyone’s prediction list for some years now, it’s definitely bound to witness a boom in 2021.

A significant number of people stayed indoors during 2020, leaving several long-term illnesses uncared for – this has highlighted the importance of telemedicine.

The rise of telemedicine is another post-COVID-19 trend that we will be directly witnessing its rise, as we will be seeing healthcare professionals being able to proactively monitor, provide care, and support patients at home.

We can expect an increased interest in wearable health devices such as blood pressure monitors, and ECGs that offers patients the ability to peep into their own health and share their medical data with their doctors remotely.

2021 looks like an interesting year for tech to say the least, but with these post-COVID-19 trends, certain challenges arise and they are namely security, the gap in industry expertise and the general IoT infrastructure.