HKUST Innovations Help to Tackle COVID-19

The HKUST community rapidly responded to the public health threat from COVID-19, launching numerous innovations from the earliest days of the global pandemic.

Technologies rolled out by School of Engineering faculty members and adopted for community use in and/or outside Hong Kong included:

• a novel, non-toxic, and super-effective smart antimicrobial sanitizer enabling large-scale and thorough long-term disinfection for more than 70 day-care centers, elderly homes, schools, shopping malls, sports training facilities, and others, as well as the HKUST campus;
• smart geo-fencing technology for quarantine tracking to more effectively check whether confinees leave their designated areas;
• a smart fever screening system to identify people with a high temperature, a significant symptom of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, especially those moving within larger groups of travelers or passers-by;
• autonomous vehicles for delivering food to residents in locked-down locations.

Many other School of Engineering contributions have continued to assist the worldwide battle to stem the virus and mitigate its impact.