After COVID-19: How Can Smart Tech Make Healthcare More Resilient?

Data has also become one of our most powerful weapons against the virus: some form of contact tracing has been implemented in every country that has managed to bring the infection under control, whether manual or digital. In the months and years to come, the analysis of ever-larger datasets, so-called “Big Data,” will come to further define our responses and determine our resilience to future crises.

So far, we have barely scratched the surface, says Michael Pietrzkiewicz, electronics engineering technologist at WSP in Alberta, Canada. “The more data you can gather over time, the more accurate it will be,” he says. “If we want to have resilience on-the-fly, we need to be comfortable that the data is correct or we’re not going to react to it.