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Review
. 2021 Jan;3(1):25-39.
doi: 10.1002/hbe2.237. Epub 2020 Dec 1.

A critical review of emerging technologies for tackling COVID-19 pandemic

Elliot Mbunge  1 , Boluwaji Akinnuwesi  1 , Stephen G Fashoto  1 , Andile S Metfula  1 , Petros Mashwama  1
Affiliations
Review

A critical review of emerging technologies for tackling COVID-19 pandemic

Elliot Mbunge et al. Hum Behav Emerg Technol. 2021 Jan.

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic affects people in various ways and continues to spread globally. Researches are ongoing to develop vaccines and traditional methods of Medicine and Biology have been applied in diagnosis and treatment. Though there are success stories of recovered cases as of November 10, 2020, there are no approved treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. As the pandemic continues to spread, current measures rely on prevention, surveillance, and containment. In light of this, emerging technologies for tackling COVID-19 become inevitable. Emerging technologies including geospatial technology, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, telemedicine, blockchain, 5G technology, smart applications, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), robotics, and additive manufacturing are substantially important for COVID-19 detecting, monitoring, diagnosing, screening, surveillance, mapping, tracking, and creating awareness. Therefore, this study aimed at providing a comprehensive review of these technologies for tackling COVID-19 with emphasis on the features, challenges, and country of domiciliation. Our results show that performance of the emerging technologies is not yet stable due to nonavailability of enough COVID-19 dataset, inconsistency in some of the dataset available, nonaggregation of the dataset due to contrasting data format, missing data, and noise. Moreover, the security and privacy of people's health information is not totally guaranteed. Thus, further research is required to strengthen the current technologies and there is a strong need for the emergence of a robust computationally intelligent model for early differential diagnosis of COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID‐19; contact tracing; diagnoses; emerging technology; pandemic; screening; surveillance; tracking.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Countries that applied AI in tackling COVID‐19
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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