IoT to your wounds: why the Internet of things is most welcome in the era of coronavirus

Coronavirus changes the world - more precisely, the world changes in response to the coronavirus, it is indisputable. It changes in big and small. Among the most surprising news of recent times is news about how pandemics are beginning to be talked about even in areas that, it would seem, could not have been further from epidemiology. Shutdown of the Russian and global economies resonates in all areas of IT - from simple hosting and enikeystva to VR, AR and the Internet of things.

The other day, I took part in the most unexpected poll in which I participated recently: how COVID-19 will change Internet of Things (IoT). It turns out that people have such concerns.

The survey involved companies that somehow use the Internet of things in their work. The purpose of the survey is to find out the relationship of companies with IoT “before cove”, to understand how they will change “after cove”. And they will change, that is certain.

But one thing can already be said with certainty: during the crisis caused by COVID-19, the Internet of things becomes more relevant.



In a situation where not to shake hands became a sign of hostility as a manifestation of concern, people have no choice but to rely more and more on human-machine contact as an intermediary or even replace many previous human-human contacts.

By the way, I completely disagree with the people who are being killed on this occasion: of course, the loss of the usual emotional background, which went along with live communication - this is unpleasant. But in reality, the choice is not between “pleasant” and “unpleasant”. In reality, it’s good that there is a choice at all - people who lived during the previous pandemics, from the Spaniard to the Black Death, would die for the opportunity to replace human contact with machine contact for a while. And for introverts this is generally a holiday - “We have been preparing for this all our lives!”

The Internet of things came in handy, allowing now to solve the most necessary tasks in order to survive the pandemic and get out of the subsequent economic crisis as quickly as possible: remote control over the state of affairs in a closed enterprise, contactless logistics, remote monitoring of the state of people (for example, elderly or in quarantine).

Although I am professionally familiar with this market, the range of applications impressed me. Looking at the list of possible applications, I thought that a freelancer who uses a fitness tracker can be considered "a company that uses IoT to monitor people's heart rate."



However, despite my enthusiasm for the importance and necessity of the Internet of things, I can’t agree that in five years we will already be living in a fully digitized reality. But we are moving in this direction.



The Internet of things is too important a technology to limit its use to IT.