[Paper Review] Unleashing the power of disruptive and emerging technologies amid COVID-19: A detailed review

Sonali Agarwal, Punn Ns+5 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|May 23, 2020

IoT and Edge/Fog ComputingComputer Science160 references60 citations

TL;DR

This paper surveys emerging, future, and disruptive technologies and their SWOT-driven applications to mitigate COVID-19, outlining human-centric and smart-space themes and proposing prioritized research directions for a post-COVID world.

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), during early December 2019 in Wuhan, China, has quickly evolved into a global pandemic, became a matter of grave concern, and placed government agencies worldwide in a precarious position. The scarcity of resources and lack of experiences to endure the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the fear of future consequences has established the need for adoption of emerging and future technologies to address the upcoming challenges. Since the last five months, the amount of pandemic impact has reached its pinnacle that is altering everyone's life; and humans are now bound to adopt safe ways to survive under the risk of being affected. Technological advances are now accelerating faster than ever before to stay ahead of the consequences and acquire new capabilities to build a safer world. Thus, there is a rising need to unfold the power of emerging, future and disruptive technologies to explore all possible ways to fight against COVID-19. In this review article, we attempt to study all emerging, future, and disruptive technologies that can be utilized to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Building on background insights, detailed technological specific use cases to fight against COVID-19 have been discussed in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). As concluding remarks, we highlight prioritized research areas and upcoming opportunities to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological domain-specific challenges and also illuminate collaborative research directions for moving towards a post-COVID-19 world.

Motivation & Objective

• Explain the role of emerging and disruptive technologies in addressing COVID-19 challenges.
• Classify technologies into human-centric and smart-space themes and map their interconnections.
• Provide SWOT analyses for technology-enabled COVID-19 use cases.
• Identify prioritized research areas and collaborative directions for post-COVID-19 recovery.

Proposed method

• Review historically and conceptually the landscape of disruptive and emerging technologies.
• Categorize technologies into human-centric and smart-space themes and describe related trends.
• Present technology-enabled COVID-19 use cases with SWOT analysis across domains.
• Offer a timeline of technology emergence and summarize related research work.
• Propose prioritized research areas and future opportunities for post-COVID-19 society.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What are the disruptive and emerging technologies most relevant to mitigating COVID-19 impacts?
• RQ2 How can human-centric and smart-space technologies be mapped to COVID-19 use cases and outcomes?
• RQ3 What SWOT factors affect the adoption of these technologies for pandemic response and recovery?
• RQ4 What future research directions and collaborations are prioritized to advance a post-COVID-19 world?

Key findings

• A taxonomy of disruptive technology themes is presented, including human-centric, smart-space, and other categories.
• SWOT analyses are provided for technology-enabled COVID-19 use cases across domains such as data, privacy, and governance.
• The paper delineates a timeline of technology emergence and links to related research work and surveys.
• A framework of prioritized research areas and collaborative directions is offered to bridge physical, digital, and biological domains.
• The work emphasizes convergence of technologies for planning and divergence for domain-specific expertise.
• It highlights the need for transparency, traceability, and AI/security considerations in deploying these technologies.