GISCafe Voice Industry Predictions 2022 – Part 5

In this final installment of GISCafe Voice Industry Predictions for 2022, we can see more of multiple topics geospatial will need to address in the coming years. Whether countries are developing or not, they will have levels of requirements for automation and geospatial technology. Tersus and HSR Health outline the need for geospatial technology in the areas of farming, healthcare, disease management, safety and construction. These are exciting times for those developing new ways of addressing old and new challenges.

Geospatial Data Must for More Efficient Society

Xiaohua Wen, Founder & CEO of Tersus GNSS

The world is always developing and growing, but at different times, it has different manifestations. The phenomenon of global recession means that production efficiency needs to be boosted.  Geospatial data and technologies, like highly accurate positioning solutions, can contribute to the automation of production. In developed countries, in particular, the auto-steering system is already widely used in agriculture for seeding, spraying and harvesting. The automatic control system is also widely used in construction and earth work, like road roller, bulldozer and pile driver. It improves the productivity, safety of workers and quality of work.

Developing countries still have lots of infrastructure gaps, as compared to developed countries. They can benefit more from new technologies and the experience of the developed world. We think geospatial data can bring a cleaner and more efficient society, especially in developing countries. Since we are marketing our product globally and the business covers almost all parts of the world, we are not feeling the pinch of recession. In fact, we see a lot of growth coming from developing countries, since there will be more infrastructure construction, which needs geospatial tools. Further, automation in developed countries also needs positioning systems.

Innovations benefitting industry

Tersus always embraces new technologies. We think innovations can make the world better, especially in the geospatial area. As we can already see, the geospatial industry is benefitting from new techniques like BIM, 3D scan, UAV, etc. These techniques are helping to digitalize the real world more accurately and with higher repeatability. This is helping the decision-makers in optimizing their strategies. Positioning data is always one of the most important elements of a Digital Twin, and Tersus GNSS is dedicated towards providing high accuracy positioning.

We strive to provide cost-effective GNSS centimeter accuracy positioning solutions to our customers. Since more and more applications are relying on accurate and dependable centimeter locations, such as agriculture, machine control, UAV related applications, robotic system, etc. We bring in a more cost-effective solution, which can help more applications — their creators can think about using high accuracy positioning solutions into the apps. We believe that a highly accurate GNSS positioning technology will not only be used in professional industry, but will also become part of people’s daily lives.

Changes for the good

Today, we see a lot of mobile carriers rolling out a centimeter accuracy CORS system in their mobile base station tower. We see it as a positive signal since many applications will happen on the mobile phone side. As far as Tersus is concerned, we will have some new app on the Android platform. We will invest more than double in research and development in the coming three years. We will release a more reliable and powerful positioning engine and develop more solutions to help our clients to make their work more efficient.

Xiaohua Wen, is Founder & CEO of Tersus GNSS

xiaohua.wen@tersus-gnss.com

2022: In Good Health is the Place to Be

The awareness of health equity, which hit the national and global stage in 2021, will carry into and come into greater focus in 2022. Health equity starts on the local level and is key to solving global health challenges. Addressing health equity will be powered by the utilization of health data, especially health-focused geospatial data. According to Report Linker, the geospatial data industry is poised to grow by $59.40 billion during 2021-2025, with the increasing utilization of geospatial health data being a primary driver.

Enterprises and health systems will continue to invest in health-focused geospatial data collection and the implementation of tested and reliable systems to analyze this data to find where health inequities lie. Healthcare leaders – and the global community – will need to answer to these inequities. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in the quality and accessibility of proper healthcare in the United States. Dr. Ashish K. Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health & Professor of Health Services, Policy, & Practice at Brown University said, “It’s taken all of the challenges we’ve had, all of the longstanding inequities we’ve had in our country and really exposed them in a way and made them worse. It hasn’t created new inequities. I would say these inequities have existed for a long time, what it has really done is just highlight them in a way that is now hard to ignore.”

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has exposed the need for global healthcare solutions, which will be powered by widespread data collection. The recent Omicron variant outbreak solidified the notion that by the time a nation announces the discovery of a new variant, it has likely spread to many others and is beyond hope of containing. [Furthermore, the global response to South Africa’s discovery included prematurely calling the variant the “South African Variant” and establishing travel bans. This caused concern that countries will not want to alert the global community of a new variant discovery for fear of sanctions that will hurt their economy.] The global community will have to work together and prioritize transparency and communication to contain these variants. Furthermore, the success of the COVID-19 vaccine is contingent on its use as broadly across the global community as possible.

The creation of sustainable global surveillance infrastructure and the maintenance of those systems will require adequate financing and investment. According to The Lancet, “Countries should expect to spend about US$1–4 per capita annually on disease surveillance infrastructure and personnel. For low-income and middle-income countries, substantially more start-up investment is likely to be required to strengthen laboratory capacities, data systems, and human resource capacity, as part of larger investments in health systems strengthening.” If this is to become reality, at least some of that investment will need to be met by higher-income countries and donations. In 2022, we can expect an international push towards global surveillance as both a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the availability of mass amounts of healthcare data. This push is in the same vein of the call for health equity. Health equity starts at the local level, but to truly mitigate the current COVID-19 and potential future health crisis, we need to move towards global health equity. Countries will utilize data surveillance systems at different speeds and levels, but the global community will move that line forward as a whole.

In 2022, we can expect disease surveillance to not only expand its reach but deepen in availability and normalcy. More clinical and public health dashboards will be geared towards the public. Just as people check the weather, they will check local disease transmission risk through public platforms. The introduction of disease surveillance dashboards to the public translates to dollar signs for enterprise. For the past 10 years, data slowly became currency, for the next 10- we could see health data become even more valuable. Big tech is investing in this sector. Big tech will continue to invest in digital health by acquiring innovators in the space. Microsoft recently announced its acquisition of AI firm Nuance for $19.7B, planning to “combine solutions and expertise to deliver new cloud and AI capabilities across healthcare and other industries.” (Microsoft News Source) We anticipate that big tech will continue to invest in healthcare but may shift focus from direct to consumer products to doubling down on providing technical infrastructure, with Amazon continuing to take lead in this space with the launch of Amazon Care. However, acquisitions of innovative firms combined with the increasing volume of health data will put pressure on the industry to design solutions with actionable insights. According to HIMSS, “the volume of [health] data is increasing by 48% year-on-year.” Firms that provide this data in a visualizable and consumable way will be successful – those that can also yield insights and actionable solutions will truly win.

As government entities and enterprises demand more specificity from geospatial health data, consumers will also raise their standards.

Predictions about 2022 will be incomplete without mentioning the Internet of Things. A crucial facet of Iot is location data, powered by GIS. With increasing demands and increasing acronyms, IoT GIS will be at the forefront of innovative methods for data analytics. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has the standard for communication and the sharing of data for IoT, allowing for the allocation and interpretation of varying data while geotagging and timestamping that data and therefore supporting data interoperability. Real-time GIS analyzes millions of events per second, while IoT reveals patterns and problem-solving opportunities. The is ripe for utilization in the healthcare industry, including for crisis management and response, real-time resource allocation, and the anticipation of a health crisis.

Ajay K. Gupta, CISSP, MBA,  CEO, HSR.health
agupta@HSR.health

Tags: air pollution, cloud, geospatial, GIS, GNSS, health, imagery, Infrastructure, intelligence, mapping, maps, mobile, mobile mapping, navigation

Categories: 3D Cities, agriculture, aircraft tracking, analytics, asset management, Big Data, climate change, cloud, Covid-19, data, field GIS, geospatial, GIS, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, mobile, public safety, remote sensing

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