#SparkItUp: NTT Disruption’s innovations to brighten 2021
There is no question that 2020 has been a challenging year. Yet, it has also provided the opportunity to accelerate digital transformation and change the way we live and work, forever. eCommerce, for instance, has experienced an exponential growth, while tele-working and tele-education are now perceived as a plausible and sustainable options. From NTT Disruption, we understand that technology can be used for good, and for bad. In our case, we have been working to disrupt its use to change people’s lives for good. Looking forward to 2021, this is how we plan to #SparkItUp.
Social companions to motivate strong connections
Our research has revealed that when both the elderly and children are hospitalized, they want to feel accompanied at all times. Thanks to the technique of understanding natural language and AI developed jointly between our professionals and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team, jibo has the ability to proactively monitor patient treatments. It can also converse or contact them with their family or doctors through video conferencing. It is not simply a robot that responds to people. Jibo is a social companion that interacts based on trust and empathy. He is a member of the new generation of cognitive social selves (both physical robots and virtual bots) that can be part of a person’s life. It has been proven particularly beneficial during COVID-19 when patients are forced to remain separated from their families for extended periods of time.
Social robots like jibo, can also be the eyes, ears, and body of healthcare professionals. He can aid to improve biobehavioral synchrony and cooperation with older people. Incorporating jibo as a social companion can help to significantly reduce children’s anxiety before surgery or improve the sociability of adults in residences. Jibo is an example of how technology can be applied to motivate connection and reduce the feeling of isolation.
Virtual experiences to change our scenario and our perspective
The year 2020 was particularly challenging for the event and entertainment sector. It was very difficult to replicate interactive live events and conferences experiences. At first, Zoom, Skype and Teams parties seemed like a good alternative. But they soon became monotonous and repetitive.
So, we started thinking about ways to humanize work and event in the new normal. That is how we came up with Cokoon, a new capability for space owners/ office managers enabling human-centric immersive experiences to reinvent distributed meetings, events, and social experiences. Cokoon is a virtual, fully immersive, 360-experience. It can provide people different scenarios and perspectives from one unique place.
Smart content to meet high information demand
In the past year, there has also been an increase in information consumption through a wide range of digital platforms. From Growthland, our digital marketing content creation and production services unit, we identified that many companies were finding it difficult to keep up with the production of interesting and engaging multiplatform contents. So, we started working on a Smart Content Factory to enable companies to produce high-quality contents faster and more efficiently. Alongside, we developed an Open Talent Agency, disruptive digital marketing as a service platform that connects brands to the best art & science curated talent and technologies. Finally, our Virtual Production Studios that offers phygital live events.
Zero latency acceleration for real time to insight
We started imagining a world where we did not have to wait anymore. Where everything happened right here, right now. We brought that idea to live with Zela, our zero latency acceleration initiative, which leverages on Xilinx’s technology to enable any complex and mission-critical challenge to be addressed in real-time.
NTT Disruption is conducting a proof of concept of a disruptive and innovative solution in one of Latin America’s largest hospital. The solution employs a combination of accelerated artificial intelligence and machine learning to process and verify predefined patient behaviors in real time in a video stream. It first detects risky actions for the patient and then sends different types of alerts to the healthcare professionals depending on the severity of the incident. This system aids nurses’ daily work while reducing the costs of patient observation. In turn, it allows easy scalability with the same level of response, even if the number of events increases. This initiative aims to transform health centers into smart hospitals, where different technological solutions are applied focused on people, reducing response times, and providing a better patient care.
Apart from envisioning a brighter 2021, we have been actively working on various initiatives that will spark it up, for good.
#SparkItUp
