Rethinking Edge Computing While Pandemic Is In the Forefront of Global Consciousness

Edge can be our salvation from contagion.

Edge computing can make each of us more autonomously self-protecting 24x7. By embedding sensors and data-driven automation into everything we do, edge computing can be our primary bodyguard. One key advantage that edge devices can have over our five senses is the ability to detect the otherwise invisible—such as contagious microorganisms—and to direct us proactively to keep us from unwittingly catching and spreading them.

Touchless social interactions are becoming the norm

When the current COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, we’re sure to see a boom industry in edge devices and apps designed to ward off these sorts of biohazards in the future. Once the current emergency is over, it’s likely that events will be rescheduled with biohazard safeguards instituted, workers will return to their companies’ thoroughly sanitized offices, and retail outlets will re-open with some new “germ-free” operating practices.

Increasingly, the edge is where we live our lives. Before long, most of us will not need to see, touch, or otherwise interact close-up with other human beings in order to carry on with our lives. We’re moving into a new global order in which edge-based autonomy will become everybody’s birthright.

More than that, edge will be essential for everybody to stay as safe and healthy as possible during uncertain times such as pandemics, disasters, wars, and economic upheavals. Just as important, it will be essential for the economy to survive these shocks with a minimum of disruption, even when everybody who can work from home is doing so and most consumers are quarantined or otherwise discouraged or forbidden from venturing outside.

Edge is the solution for social distancing without deprivation

This new personal autonomy depends on a range of technologies that will make edge-based experiences just as enriching as anything we’d grown accustomed to previously. Most experiences will be device-mediated, on-demand, online, wireless, self-service, mobile, social, adaptive, streaming, virtual, and cloud-centric. Chief among the technological enablers for a touch-free existence will include 5G, robotics, near-field communications, proximity sensors, embedded artificial intelligence, computer vision, and augmented reality.

The edge will permeate how people band together in response to pandemics and other shocks to community cohesion. Mobile sensors will inform the real-time guidance we all derive from social-distancing apps, interactive infection-alerting mapping apps, contact-tracing apps, and other edge-informed solutions that can prevent each of us from exposure to contagion or signal if we might have already been exposed and need to self-quarantine.

Edge-based 3D printers will be used to create underdeveloped materials during a disaster. Connected robots and drones will be used to deliver food and medications, keep medical workers from catching and spreading infections, and ensure that parcels reach their intended recipients, monitor compliance with quarantines and lockdowns. 5G will create the scalable bandwidth to enable dense clusters of edge devices everywhere. And cloud-to-edge computing technologies will make working from home the default workplace siting model, rather than necessary stopgap, for many more workers.

How edge becomes the foundation for society to survive these shocks

Edge is also likely to be at the heart of how the world economy bounces back in 2020 from the current panic. Once the current emergency is over, it’s likely that events will be rescheduled with edge-monitored and actuated biohazard safeguards instituted. Workers will return to their companies’ thoroughly sanitized offices amid robotic cleaning devices that make sure those facilities stay squeaky clean. Retail outlets will re-open with some “germ-free” operating practices that will be monitored by ubiquitous sensors.

We also like to see more adoption of edge solutions such as this Raspberry Pi device that can help identify flu-like symptoms in crowds. An IoT device that tracks coughing and crowd size in real time could become a standard feature of buildings, homes, public transportation, and other environments where people gather. In addition to a Raspberry Pi board, it incorporates a cheap microphone array, thermal sensor, and an Intel Movidius 2 neural computing engine. It classifies audio samples, identifies the number of people in a room at any given time, distinguish coughing from other types of non-speech audio, and correlate coughing with the size of a given crowd.

People’s privacy qualms about such surveillance will have to give way to a more urgent requirement for public health. But I think that tipping point has already been crossed in our society. From a societal standpoint, this past month has really signaled that onset of a new decade, for good or ill.

Edge is a big part of how we’ll have to immunize our society against these sudden shocks.