Unleashing the power of disruptive and emerging technologies amid COVID-19: A detailed review

TL;DR

This review explores how emerging and disruptive technologies can be harnessed to combat COVID-19, analyzing their applications, strengths, weaknesses, and future research opportunities to build a safer post-pandemic world.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of various emerging technologies and their potential roles in mitigating COVID-19 impacts, highlighting research priorities and collaborative opportunities.

Findings

Identification of key technologies for COVID-19 mitigation

SWOT analysis of technological applications

Future research directions and collaborative opportunities

Abstract

The unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), during early December 2019 in Wuhan, China, has quickly evolved into a global pandemic, became a matter of grave concern, and placed government agencies worldwide in a precarious position. The scarcity of resources and lack of experiences to endure the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the fear of future consequences has established the need for adoption of emerging and future technologies to address the upcoming challenges. Since the last five months, the amount of pandemic impact has reached its pinnacle that is altering everyone's life; and humans are now bound to adopt safe ways to survive under the risk of being affected. Technological advances are now accelerating faster than ever before to stay ahead of the consequences and acquire new capabilities to build a safer world. Thus, there is a rising need to unfold the power of emerging, future and disruptive technologies to explore all possible ways to fight against COVID-19. In this review article, we attempt to study all emerging, future, and disruptive technologies that can be utilized to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Building on background insights, detailed technological specific use cases to fight against COVID-19 have been discussed in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). As concluding remarks, we highlight prioritized research areas and upcoming opportunities to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological domain-specific challenges and also illuminate collaborative research directions for moving towards a post-COVID-19 world.