Emerging smart techs in 2021

By OEM Update Editorial January 18, 2021 4:26 pm IST

While scientists developed vaccines against Covid-19 in a record time this year, emerging technologies like high-tech replacements for human volunteers could make clinical trials even faster and safer in the future.

Microneedles for painless injections and tests: These tiny needles could make injections and blood testing pain-free. “Microneedles” — at no more than the depth of a sheet of paper and the width of a human hair — can be attached to syringes or patches, or even mixed into creams. They penetrate the skin without troubling underlying nerve endings. Sun-powered chemistry: Making many of the chemicals we use every day requires fossil fuels. By using sunlight to convert waste carbon dioxide into useful chemicals, a new approach holds the promise of reducing the sector’s emissions.

Recent developments in the sunlight-activated catalysts needed for this process are a step towards creating “solar” refineries to produce useful compounds from the waste gas. These components could be turned into everything from medicines and detergents to fertilisers and textiles. Virtual patients: The process of initial assessments of drugs and treatments could become faster with virtual patients.

In this system, data taken from high-res images of a human organ is fed into a complex mathematical model of the mechanisms that control that organ’s function. Then, computer algorithms resolve the resulting equations and generate a virtual organ that behaves like the real organ. Spatial computing: Spatial computing is the next step of virtual-reality and augmented-reality technologies that bring physical and digital worlds together.

As with VR and AR, it digitizes objects that connect via the cloud, allows sensors and motors to react to one another and creates a digital representation of the real world, said the WEF and Scientific American magazine report. But it goes even further, adding spatial mapping that lets a computer “coordinator” track and control the movements and interactions of objects as a person moves through the digital or physical world.