How Covid-19 Is Driving Tech Companies

With the new virus hitting every country on the planet, much of human development and technological advancement was stalled or delayed. However, when it came to the areas that were relevant to the pandemic, every little thing flourished. In the past year, businesses, governments, schools, and much more moved online. The new fashion is the word “less”. Contactless, tasteless, powerless. In this post, we are discussing all innovations in Tech in the past year.

Hygiene

Well, one of the things we are doing more this year, or at least should be, is hand-washing. Fundamentally, every reputable health agency in the world is talking about how paramount it is to wash your hands to prevent the spread of covid. Soap destroys many viruses and bacteria, and hot water makes sure there is no residue left on the body. Public facilities were never a clean place to begin with, but with the pandemic, everybody all of the sudden got concerned with them. And for the right reason. Most people are touching all the doors, handles, and faucets in a restroom. Some particularly concerned folks have been using paper towels and napkins to avoid touching the same equipment as others do, but that won’t work in the grand scheme of things. 

That’s where contactless buttons and technologies come in. You really want to open that toilet door without touching it? There is a solution. As of 2021, most shopping malls have requested their owners to equip all of the available restrooms with a touch-free button. You signal the small radar inside a button with a simple gesture like a wave, and it opens the door for you. The same thing was popular for faucets and dispensers( towels, soap, and such), but has now become mandatory. It’s a good thing, and all the high-hygiene-conscious people are probably celebrating the whole upgrade. In the future, it will be a brow-raising activity, if somebody touches practically anything that’s not their personal property. And germs will not be happy about that. But hopefully, humans will experience better health outcomes for that reason.

Finance

Governments have been pushing for wide-scale use of cashless payments for a while now. And they do have their own selfish reasons for that, such as monitoring tax evaders and controlling the economy, the pandemic has only added a giant basis for going contactless. By not using cash, and taking advantage of a credit/debit card instead, you can avoid touching possibly contaminated pieces of paper, that were previously touched by God knows how many people, you included. 

When you are passing a paper note in a store to the cashier, you are essentially touching their hands. And even if they are wearing gloves, and changing them frequently, you are still exposing them to the unknown risks of everything that money has seen.  You do know that there are people who don’t wash their hands even when going to the bathroom? Gross, yeah. And they may be touching their money right afterward, and passing it to you. Thus, you will pass it to the next person, and so on. To avoid all of this trouble, just use a plastic card for most of your payments. 

Still, some actions do require you to be in unnecessarily close contact with another person. That delivery man that’s bringing you pizza on a Friday night? Instead of breathing right next to them, even if you want to pay with a credit card, it’s better to avoid this completely. Just pay for your Dominos online, and let the pizza greet you at the doorbell, without any contact.

Japanese magazine gotechjapan.com described a new Technology by the Hiroshima bank as touchless, hologram-like new technology in order to prevent infection. Now, when you approach their ATMs, you don’t even need to touch the displays. You wave your fingers in front of the screen, and that way you “touch” the buttons without really pressing them physically. Are we already approaching the future?

The Online Transformation

In the current day and age, we are so accustomed to using our computers, switching some of our least-favorite activities to them would be an easy decision. Paying your house-bills, filling your tax forms and even most applications can now be done on the internet. Yes, you can even put your signature on a document without leaving your home! Here is a list of software to do exactly that. You will save yourself a lot of time, transportation fees, and spare a lot of headaches by doing what you can yourself. And remember, you are doing everyone else a favor as well.