8 Ways Smart Tech Is Making the World a Better Place

It seems everywhere we turn, we’re bombarded with bad news from all around the world: coronavirus, environmental changes, government scandals, and regional conflicts. It’s easy to see and hear about all the things wrong in the world just by tuning into the latest news, and often these problems don’t seem to have any readily available solutions to solve them. It’s important to report about problems and issues from around the world to highlight the challenges we face. But it’s just as important to also focus on positive success stories, learn from them, exchange knowledge, and collaborate for a better future. We’re fortunate to work in tech as we can have a direct impact on the world both now and in the future. Technology is improving the lives of so many people in different ways. Collaboration across borders, different cultures, and businesses has never been easier. Platforms and communities enable this and make global connection easy. This is important as we need to join forces to face the challenges at hand. The Top 8 Good News Stories on our Journey for a Better World When I started researching for this blog series, I didn’t know what I would find in terms of positive stories. There are so many examples of how we’re making the world a better place through technology and below are eight of my favorite improvements:

1. Energy: Smart cities can contribute to decreasing electricity consumption and provide opportunities for energy efficiency. Renewable power is a starting point for smart cities, which brings us to more great news: a third of global power capacity is now based on renewable energy.
2. Smart farming: There are new cost-effective technologies for achieving low-emission smart farming technology. The smart technology reduces the ecological footprint of farming and develops global food security (expected 50-70% increase by 2050). Sensors can help farmers reduce the amount of chemicals on their fields, and “smart boats” can help fishermen manage their catch effectively, increasing profits and fish in the sea.
3. Resilient cities: Each year, millions of people are affected by disasters caused by extreme weather and climate change. Cities around the world are adapting to more frequent extreme weather conditions and the city of Copenhagen has come up with a solution others can learn from.
4. Animals: Climate change is impacting wildlife and animals, often negatively. But we’ve demonstrated we can reverse the extinction of the Iberian Lynx with sensors and camera traps and using bots and drones to speed up evolution to save the Great Barrier Reef.
5. Environmental monitoring: Remote monitoring can play an important role in observing and reporting on environmental problems. With IoT sensors, it’s possible to monitor just about anything (air, water, soil, etc.) and we can use the data to approach the challenge with science and evidence-based decision making.
6. Health: Wearables have for a long time been mainstream and the demand to monitor our own health by the use of wearable technology has more than tripled in the last four years. There are many benefits including encouraging proactive health care, remote patient monitoring, and patient care becoming more personalized.
7. Education: We need to get smarter to find solutions to the challenges ahead, and a way to do this could be to harness skills and collaboration that develop through gamification. This way of learning makes us learn faster and research clearly shows the more interactive a training technique, the more memorable it is.
8. Preventing natural disasters: First responders facing disasters need all the help they can get, and information from smart systems would give them a remarkable advantage along with tools to tackle the disaster from a distance. I wrote a blog post on this topic, which you can read here. 

This post is a celebration of all the good things we can achieve with technology and is meant as an inspiration to your future journey in IT and partnering with others to make the world a better place.