PERSONALIZATION IN TIMES OF A PANDEMIC

“Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things” as Stephen King famously wrote for his movie, millions around the world are hopeful about winning the fight against the deadly Coronavirus. On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. And people, healthcare professionals and governments are working relentlessly towards preventing further spread of the virus. Entire cities and nations have come to lockdowns, the economy is taking a hit . According to the opinion of several experts, a recession is underway. Social distancing has become imperative and employees are working from home in self quarantine.

World’s fastest supercomputer, the IBM ‘Summit’ has identified 77 drug compounds that can help corona virus from infecting a person and help create a vaccine. Technology thus, has always come to the rescue for humanity and we can bet on it to get us through this crisis. Personalization enabled by technology is helping to ease and improve the functioning of healthcare, educational and business organizations.

Healthcare

Keeping people healthy will depend on the ability of healthcare professionals in understanding and addressing diverse populations differently . The healthcare industry has had a head start in personalization. According to a survey conducted by accenture nearly one third of the respondents have used virtual care in some form and it is also observed that younger generations prefer medical institutions that have strong digital capacities. Injecting technology like edge computing opens up hundreds of opportunities for improvement and personalization in the healthcare sector.

There are possibilities for observing and monitoring individual patients in their homes where they are quarantined. For example, A body sensor network system can be developed which can provide at risk patients healthcare services like medical monitoring, medical data access and communicate with hospitals during emergencies by using GPRS and network technologies. It can provide physicians access to patients physiological signals without interrupting their lives, which is highly applicable for the self quarantine patients.

There is also a possibility for immediate medical response delivery by using edge computing technology. The present systems that exist require the sensors to be placed close to the patients’ bed and limit his/her movements. Continuous health care monitoring without the limitations of distance can be achieved through a multi-hop routing scheme to wirelessly relay information to a base station.

Presently there are companies like Philips involved in commercial implementation of IoT based patient health monitoring systems in hospitals at large scale level. But as mentioned earlier, these are limited by the boundaries of the patient’s movement. Delivering life saving immediate medical responses to patients by sensing the vitals of the patient and without direct intervention from the doctors side. Present systems are more of an aid to support the doctors physical intervention in delivering the treatment to the patients.

Education

As hundreds of cities are under lockdown and schools and educational institutions are closed. Millions of students are in their homes. The availability of improved connectivity helps expand the reach of personalized learning for students, which might prove to be more efficient than an in-class learning experience in several ways. Personalization has been of constant interest and mention in education, especially higher education. But the presence of so called “pedagogical gaps” are becoming more evident in all efforts and literature on personalization in education. Earlier studies have shown that providing people with information based on their individual characteristics is enabled by computer-tailored educational interventions.

U-computing environments allows systems to understand the students behaviour and environment parameters like location, behaviour of learner and even temperature and humidity of the learning environment thereby customizing the learning experience to each need and hence improving the quality of learning. Intended learning is cumulative, assimilative, accommodative and meaningful. Not only does education technology and personalized learning benefit the learner, it also benefits and improves the efficiency of the teacher/ instructor. Students can learn at their own pace and the instructor can get immediate access to the learning progress and evaluation of the student also becomes easier.

Several exams have been postponed due to the virus outbreak. Creating an examination and evaluation model where the students have the liberty to attempt tests from within their homes would prove to be an efficient solution, since there is uncertainty regarding the lockdown duration. Although this solution can be implemented, applying the existing technology requires a significant change in the perspective of educational institutions and on how they test the progress of students . It would require a revolution in the educational system and pattern followed traditionally, especially in places like India.

Businesses

Although the economic downturn has been accelerated by COVID-19, businesses are struggling and continue to function efficiently enough to support citizens. Due to the recent lockdown, all businesses except basic groceries and vegetable shops are not functioning. However companies are continuing operations by deploying employees to stay and work from home. Technological improvements in cloud computing, communication and networks makes it simpler and easier, creating a virtual work environment for employees.

Although several organizations have tried to fully and partially implement work from home for employees even before the crisis, such a large scale deployment of remote workforce would be new to several firms. Learning and development teams in organizations are taking into account the specific knowledge about each employee and their unique needs to develop personalized training and learning programmes.

Personalization also helps improve employee engagement. Personalized employee-facing technology enables independent problem solving by providing effective resources and hence improving speed and quality of work. Self service platform apps in organizations facilitate needs that would have earlier required a direct dialogue with the HR personnel. Thus employee centric self service technology helps improve work during times of quarantine. Singapore based company, Crayon data has developed maya.ai , the world first AI engine dedicated to understanding human tastes. They have created a platform for enterprises to explore and understand the dynamics of customer tastes and every tool needed to help make the most of it. This means employees can now create and deliver campaigns to match customer taste trends, monitor the results and also find new merchants to partner with. Helping businesses use personalization to their advantage.

Virtual working offers employees more control over their daily schedule. Customization, access and optimization are the pros of a virtual work environment. However, leadership and recognition becomes challenges to this are not all managers are well-equipped to control and manage a virtual workforce. Many organizations get it right with help of collaboration technology. Collaboration technology allows employees across functions, geographies to work in tandem by means of tools and systems to facilitate the group work.

Personalization powered by artificial intelligence and BI tools are thus invisibly playing a much bigger role in the fight against this pandemic. Let’s keep up the fight against this virus, and hope that the phase of social distancing helps bring our hearts and minds together for a better tomorrow. And thus completing the quote by Stephen King- “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things… and no good thing ever dies”.