Technology and its Solutions in the Era of COVID-19 Crisis: A Review of Literature

An important feature of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is its rapid human to human transfer.Technologies can play an important role in controlling this disease. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the technologies that have been applied to solve the COVID-19 crisis. Besides, the approaches used by these technologies are surveyed.

In this narrative review, international databases were searched for papers investigating the role of various technologies in the management of COVID-19 from December 2019 to 20 April 2020. The keywords searchedwere “Technology”, “COVID-19”, “nCOV-19”, Diagnostic Technologies”, “Therapeutic technologies”, “Telemedicine”, “Internet of Things”, “Big data”, “Blockchain”, “Robots”, and “Drones”. Forty-seven articles were found to meet the inclusion criteria after the title, abstract, and full text were reviewed.

Two major categories of technology were found to be applied to combat COVID-19. The first category involves technologies that have the potential to support the diagnostic process and case-finding including non-contact thermometers, artificial intelligence, drones, self-assessment applications, and virus genome sequencing. The second category includes technologies with therapeutic and logistic applications searching for medicines or vaccines, and provide support services such as pharmaceutical tech, robots, telemedicine, Geographic Information System (GIS), Internet of Things, and big data and blockchain.

It can be concluded that technologies with the ability to reduce human contacts through teleservices as well as those that quickly enable decision-making via in-depth analysis received more attention among the health authorities and organizations.