Technology likes a challenge and, in a global pandemic, there’s certainly a challenge on the horizon. Whether it’s poorly people looking to keep their spirits up, workers trying to do their jobs, businesses trying to keep things running or governments attempting to get back to ‘normal’ as quickly as humanly possible, people are turning to technological solutions to their current predicament.

It’s a trend already observed in China and now, like the virus itself, spreading to the rest of the planet.

Here’s how tech is helping to keep spirits – and productivity – up in a time of crisis.

Rediscovering the power of social networking

Being on your own can be tough – both from a practical and emotional perspective. Yet, for all of the drawbacks of social media, technology has long-proved its power in bringing people together and breaking down communication boundaries. As working from home becomes the temporary-norm for millions of people in Asia and around the world, people are increasingly relying on video calls for face-to-face interaction with the outside world.

Microsoft Teams, for example, now has more than 44 million daily active users – more than double the 20 million using the platform in November 2019. Other services – professional and personal – are proving crucial in helping to break down boundaries. Indeed, this crisis is pushing previously-sceptical users to try such technologies and we might well expect them to still flourish post-crisis and become a permanent fixture at work and in, for example, the healthcare sector.

Technology is also providing us with the platform to share. It’s helping communities to do everything from flag up services that are supporting vulnerable residents right through recommending what to watch, listen, or read (be that fun fiction and escapist entertainment or serious works that can boost your knowledge such as the trading books on this list).

Social interaction, community organising and knowledge sharing were all things we used to love and cherish about the world wide web – this crisis is causing people to rediscover what it was that caused us to embrace a digital world so readily in the past couple of decades.

Crunching the numbers

The role of tech isn’t just a warm and fuzzy one, however. Tech can quite quickly pivot to providing practical, useful information for policymakers. As Health Tech Magazine noted, healthcare tech vendors have been updating their software to better identify potential trends and trouble spots.

Health monitoring platform Blue Dot alerted its clients to the outbreak nine days before the World Health Organisation and uses natural language processing, AI and machine learning to process large volumes of data. Harvard Medical School is using citizen-generated data to monitor the disease and the University of Washington is using an online game to crowdsource contributions to its research.

Of course, Singapore has really led the way here, with Covid-19 SG – a government-supported creation of a coding academy to help citizens see every known infection case. Many other parts of the world have jealously looked on, not least because the Lion City’s approach appear to have been more successful than that taken by others.

Inventing new products

Technology has helped to ‘disrupt’ many industries – so it’s only fitting that it’s also able to help during a time of disruption. Some businesses are, for example, speeding up their switch to automation in a world where it’s no longer possible to deploy human beings in a tightly-packed manufacturing setting. Robo assistants are also being used in a variety of settings – be that customer service or healthcare - to avoid the need for unnecessary face-to-face human interaction.

Other inventors are focussing on fulfilling the demand for products such as air purifiers, thermal scanners and disinfectant spray guns. These are likely to be especially necessary if businesses want to get back up and running as quickly as possible – but also because there’s likely to be a heightened sense of our vulnerability to viruses as a result of this crisis.

Wherever there are new ‘problems’ and increased demand, technology is trying to find a solution. Through getting back to its strengths as a facilitator, leading the way with handling and processing data and fuelling new inventions, tech is helping to keep the world going in the short term, while paving the way for the post-corona future.