Big Data’s Role in the Post-COVID Era Posted on : Sep 11 - 2020

Big Data serves a pivotal role in today’s unpredictable socio-economic climate and will continue to do so in the post-COVID era. Data makes noise on two grounds: its creation and its application. With proper processing and storage support from edge hardware, the control and use of data will become more important than ever.

As the world adjusts to the post-COVID reality, data may hold the key to many of our new daily functions.

New routes for tracking and creating data

A number of emerging devices are poised to produce real-time, hyper-local personal health information meant to keep citizens safe and healthy in ways we haven’t seen before; from stick-on sensors that provide 24/7 respiratory activity tracking, to AI-powered long distance body temperature scanners at the train station. It’s not just new hardware either. Existing devices with new uses are also going to help. Smart watches to monitor quarantine compliance or Internet-connected thermometers to assess symptom trends are just two examples. Automated devices like these, combined with manual tools like contact tracing and healthcare check-in smartphone apps, create an entirely new sphere of health-related data.

On par with health data, novel approaches to behavioral data are also creating swaths of extremely valuable information relevant to COVID-era life. One obvious target lies in smartphone data. In the United States, government agencies are working on a collaboration between mobile advertising companies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor population movement in the interest of safety. Such information has already been used this way in many other world regions. View More