We hope that the US will soon enter a post-pandemic world. It will probably be a tentative experiment. The memories are still raw and the conditioning – wash your hands for two “Happy Birthday” songs! Don’t touch your face! – it’s still instinctive. Meanwhile, throughout 2020, the technology industry has boosted products aimed at minimizing, sanitizing or tracking physical touch. Which of these will we discard when society reopens fully and what can become permanent?
Tomohiro Ohsumi via Getty Images
Earlier this year, while epidemiologists were still discovering the main ways of transmitting the virus, we began to see new applications for wearables. The Immutouch, for example, was a bracelet designed to break compulsive habits like nail biting, vibrating whenever the user raised his hand to a specific position. Instead, the founders turned to a product that vibrates when you’re about to touch your face. During the summer, NASA made a similar product in the form of a 3D printed open source necklace called Pulse.
Touch-sensitive screens, controlled by gestures, also reached museums and shopping malls. One version, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, was made by the Ideum. You don’t just control a cursor with hand movements, bending your finger to click or closing your fist to drag objects; if you try to physically touch the screen, the border turns red, dispensing with a slight rebuke. The system won Ultraleap’s developer competition to design a better touch-less interface, a competition that also saw projects to buy custom ice cream and operate an elevator.
Tanay Singhal, Mahika Phutane and Ultraleap
If you had to make contact with the physical world, both Apple and Samsung introduced hand washing features to their smartwatches to clean properly afterwards. For Galaxy Watch, a hand washing app reminds you to clean every two hours and allows you to swipe to start a 25-second timer as soon as it starts. Meanwhile, in watchOS 7, the device can automatically detect when you are washing your hands using motion sensors and the sound of running water, timing the process accordingly.
To monitor their condition, the $ 300 Oura smart rings – the ones the NBA spread on – were intended to detect the symptoms of COVID-19 by tracking temperature and heart rate among other measurements, while Fitbit also introduced temperature tracking of skin on your Sense smartwatch. And, of course, the Apple and Google exposure notification project can tell you if you’ve come across someone who could be contagious.
However, the fact is that the usefulness of some of these pandemic devices may not survive the terrible time we are in. There is little evidence, for example, that we need to use portable air purifiers, like the specimen that LG is offering. Nor, as science has increasingly shown that the virus spreads mainly through the air and not on surfaces, excessive displays of public disinfection are necessarily vital, even when regular hand washing and hygiene awareness remain important.
LG Electronics
To get a sense of lasting contactless changes in our world, then, think of the subtle trends in moderating our use of touch that were already underway.
Contactless payments have been in place for a long time; Kohl’s top 7-11 stores now allow store customers to pay through an app. Some US airports are using digital tokens on a smartphone to verify identity, reducing the back-and-forth of handing over passports to agents. The new apartments are increasingly equipped with keyless locks, opening automatically when you are around or activating by smartphone. Restaurants turned to menus (and sometimes payments) accessed via QR codes at each table. Drone deliveries now carry the fantasy of a perfectly sterile supply chain, where no human being needs to touch an object. As we reported, this year they delivered everything from PPE to bagels, with tests in progress in Virginia and Florida.
All of these are trends that have been promised for a long time and now disappear with the so-called “new normal” of pandemic life: stay at home whenever possible and remain vigilant about hygiene in the outside world.
Where working with others is a necessity, computer vision startups are now selling their artificial intelligence skills to monitor workplaces for proper social distance or wearing masks. Amazon, in fact, has already implemented the technology – calling it the Remote Assistant – in warehouses. This is not the only area where Amazon pivoted. Echo Frames – basically, glasses with Alexa – this year were marketed by Jeff Bezos’ company as useful because they can be operated without touch, a form of computing with which you can interact under facial protection. Amazon’s ‘Go’ supermarkets, without cash, have continued to expand – and suddenly look more attractive than exposing themselves to a human supermarket employee.
These technologies were already being developed. But the pandemic’s imperatives gave them a new openness to the public. In a time of social change, when people are forced to pick up new habits, technology companies are very happy to incorporate their voice computing or computer vision systems into society. Do you want us to, say, computers tracking the exact movements of each warehouse employee – how can this technology be used after the pandemic? – is another question. It is a question worth asking because, since we allow powerful new technologies in our lives, it is more difficult to go back in time later.
Maybe we can wake up one day soon, make all our trips, work and shop while we will hardly find, let alone touch, another organic entity. In this case, the funny thing may be that this was the individualistic, contactless future that we were already headed for. It only arrived a little earlier.