E-learning platforms have been around for many decades, but haven’t been able to create the kind of  ‘transformational’ impact that has long been promised. With the Coronavirus ‘black swan’ event, all of these remote learning platforms have gotten a sudden push into the mainstream, even in places where people could not envision such options earlier due to poor infrastructure and other socio-economic issues. 

The size of the E-learning market had already been pegged to cross USD 240 Billion by 2023, and now this projection is going to go up further. It is no wonder then, that in the coming days we will see newer companies entering the remote learning race utilizing emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing & Augmented and Virtual Reality to compete with established market leaders.  

Emerging technologies that are set to take e-learning solutions to the next level

Artificial Intelligence

According to Forbes, “Artificial intelligence can act as a virtual tutor and answer questions on the fly”.

Artificial Intelligence-powered E-learning platforms will be equipped to identify and assess learners’ levels of understanding and suggest customized paths of learning. Content analytics powered by AI makes personalized and learner-centered approaches possible – these would be based on the learner’s intellectual level, from kindergarten through higher education to even corporate training. Developing these solutions is no longer a daunting task with the advent of AIaaS or “AI as a Service” – now these solutions are easy to implement and come with enticing benefits. 

Augmented Reality (AR)

AR solutions bring more engagement, excitement, and innovation to e-learning platforms making content more consumable, enjoyable, and valuable. Augmented Reality techniques will be widely utilized to increase engagement for learners through activities, rather than the traditional read and write learning methodology. Augmented reality can also be used to offer customized learning options to suit differently-abled students with special needs to learn better, as AR includes gesture, voice recognition, and image rendering experiences.

Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Laboratories are some of the best places to learn – they allow students to acquire knowledge, experiment with different methods of arriving at answers, and experience real equipment, inculcating active learning and the development of skills based on solving challenges. Simulating labs virtually makes it possible for the users to stay connected through the internet to a remote physical system, and conduct web-based technical experiments. Students can extend their depth of knowledge in areas of control systems, programming, database, various other web-based applications, tools, and technologies. 

Virtual labs are also extremely beneficial to run experiments that are normally too expensive, unsafe to run, or unavailable.  They also allow students to repeat an experiment multiple times,  giving them the opportunity to see how changed parameters and settings affect the outcome without wasting resources.

The Internet of Things

The number of devices that will be a part of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2025 will be around 75 billion in number. The rise in IoT is going to further improve the e-learning experience. Already we see how mobile learning allows learners to access E-learning courses with absolute freedom of time and place. In the future, we are going to see more content in the form of images and videos.  24X7 access to the internet across a number of wearables will make teachers redesign assessment from “remembering and writing down”, to “evaluate and elucidate concepts on the go”.

If you’re thinking of using these technologies to your advantage to build or improve your E-learning systems and solutions, reach out to the expert technology consultants at Black Rock IT Solutions. blackrock has built spectacular EduTech platforms for organizations across the globe – with our years of experience and know-how in the latest technologies such as AI and AR/VR, blackrock is certain to deliver the best solution with minimum time investment.

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Here are the top 5 trends which will revolutionize healthcare

AI and Deep Learning

AI and Deep learning (often used interchangeably) will bring some of the biggest innovations in the healthcare industry. AI systems are being actively pursued for drug development, early diagnosis, treatment protocol, personalized medicine and patient monitoring and care. AI has been extensively used in the field of Radiology as evidenced from the New York Times story. Some of the notable industry leaders who are developing AI/ Deep learning-based healthcare solution include:

• IBM’s Watson:- It can diagnose, analyze scientific papers and even help in drug discovery
• Microsoft’s Hanover project:- It analyses medical research and predicts cancer drug treatment approaches for patients
• Google’s DeepMind:- Image analysis for cancer recognition and early health risk detection

The use of AI will help decrease the overall healthcare cost, as accurate diagnosis and preventive medical intervention using technological solutions become mainstream. Countries with very little access to experts can use similar technologies to democratize healthcare for the masses.

IoT/ Wearables

The tech industry has seen many devices being launched to satisfy even the most diverse of consumer needs. Devices now are so sophisticated, that it is almost as accurate as a professional ECG machine. Interestingly, IoT devices in the future will have much more potential than the off the shelf wearable tech available today.

Future devices could enable remote patient monitoring using smart sensors and integrate the data generated with the larger healthcare infrastructure wirelessly. 5G technology will certainly be a great boost to the infrastructure needs needed for the IoT ecosystem. When 5G becomes more common, IoT devices will get a lot more common and mainstream.

Let’s look at some of the examples of how IoT can influence the future of healthcare.

• For Patients: – Preventive medicine enabled by wearables will be the big buzz of the future. Wearable devices would be able to monitor blood pressure, heart rate and glucose levels with very high accuracy that it would be classified as a healthcare device.
• For Physicians: – Physicians can monitor and intervene more effectively by analyzing the data from wearable devices. Data collected can also be used to identify the best treatment approach for patients.
• For Hospitals: – Hospitals can use IoT enabled systems for monitoring equipment, tracking pharma inventory among other things. Post-operative monitoring of patients is also a new area of research.
• For Insurance companies: – Insurance companies are piloting programs which reduced health insurance premiums for people sharing data from their wearables and health apps. This will become common. Data from multiple devices can be used to calculate individualized risk profile and then corresponding premiums will be calculated according to a person’s risk profile.

Cloud Innovation

Even though the advantages of moving to cloud ecosystem are many, healthcare systems have been the slowest to transition due to the sensitivity of data and more importantly privacy legislations. As cloud becomes more and more acceptable in our day to day life, it is but natural that healthcare data would also transition to the cloud.

As HIPAA/ GDPR compatible cloud solutions become more common, it will become an essential part of the healthcare landscape.  Some of the use cases of Cloud solutions in healthcare are:

• Data Visualization tools would represent health parameters of an individual into usable forms for self & professional evaluation. Data for this can be collected from various sources including medical devices, wearables and even connected weighing machine.
• Counterfeit protection of drugs, medical equipment, and other consumables.
• EHR or Electronic Health Record could be used to track a patient history between physicians, hospitals and insurance companies.
• Mobile apps can be used extensively in the healthcare industry for pre, during and post hospital care.

 Blockchain

Blockchain’s main advantage is that applications built using blockchain algorithms will have very high data privacy and security. Blockchain technology will primarily be used in healthcare to store and transfer data securely.

If blockchain technologies are introduced to pharma supply chain, it could effectively reduce instances of fake and counterfeit drugs within the system. Areas which will see blockchain technology implemented are:

• Medical data management
• Supply chain management

AR/VR

Telemedicine has been one of the greatest successes of technology in the healthcare sector. With solutions available now, patients can access the services of a physician from anywhere in the world. This means that patients can get access to doctors who are otherwise not available to them. These technologies, even though great, has its limitations. AR and VR technologies can greatly augment these capabilities and improve the final user experience.

With the advent of AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality) and related technologies, Physicians can touch, diagnose and even conduct surgeries remotely using these technologies. AR and VR will enable the doctor to see the patient without being present near the patient. Some of the application of AR/ VR technology in healthcare include:

• Telemedicine
• Robotics and remote surgery
• Training Physicians

 Conclusion

The focus of the healthcare industry is slowly shifting from treatment to preventive care. This means the industry also is moving from products and services model to solutions model. To make this transition, it is important to adopt and implement technologies such as AI and AR. The advantage of using technology is that while it improves the quality of care for patients, it also reduces the overall healthcare cost. Using technology is a big win for all the stakeholders. Healthcare industry as a whole must rethink and transform their strategies to stay ahead of the curve.

blackrock has extensive experience working with partners and clients to implement AR/ VR, mobile, IoT and cloud technologies in the healthcare domain. We have worked with hospitals, ISVs and insurance companies to transform and aid their digital transformation strategies.

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Analytics in AoT

The advantage of AoT is that you can aggregate data from multiple devices and make comparisons across time and users, leading to better decisions. Big Data Analytics analyzes huge volumes of user-generated data in order to support long-term use cases such as predictive maintenance, capacity planning, customer 360 feedback and revenue protection. AoT meanwhile, points to the collecting and compressing of massive amounts of low latency, short duration, and high volume machine generated data coming from a wide variety of sensors, to support real time use cases such as operational optimization, real-time ad bidding, as well as fraud and security breach detection. (*source: Dell EMC)

Example

The example of the Smart Parking and Smart Routing Services feeding new data to AoT, illustrated how this provides a very different view of parking and traffic activities.

Smart Services not only find a static answer when the question is asked, but will continue to actively maintain a best choice throughout the journey in respect of dynamic changes in parking bay availability. AoT adds entirely new and original data sets, which have not been available from traditional sources, from Smart Service requests and outcomes. Some examples of the data available from the above use case are:

1. Starting and destination geo-location shared by the citizen.
2. The true total demand for parking including requests that were unfulfilled.
3. The routes used.
4. The journeys abandoned due to non-availability of a parking bay.

The example of the Smart Parking and Smart Routing Services feeding new data to AoT, illustrated how this provides a very different view of parking and traffic activities.

The computing capacity of ‘Things’ has grown exponentially over the last few years and this has resulted in a change in the way data is analyzed. Many of the early IoT applications were about collecting data from ‘Things’ and sending them elsewhere for analysis. But now the increased computing capacity of ‘Things’ allows complex computation to run on-site. This new trend is referred as Edge computing, as part of the work happens right at the edge of the network where IoT connects the physical world to the Cloud. Edge computing is not just limited to data processing and computation on IoT devices. The vital part of it is a strong and seamless integration between IoT and cloud. Edge computing preserve privacy, reduce latency and is robust to connectivity issues.

Internet of Things is useful only if the “things” are smart, and this will happen through the Analytics of Things. Companies that have taken a data-driven approach are making a lot more progress when compared to traditional businesses. Many large companies are investing in IoT edge analytics as it is the answer to maintenance and usability of data.

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