Author: The Conversation

Information and communication technologies can dramatically improve healthcare delivery. They can make communication and exchange of information between healthcare professionals easier. And patients can consult doctors remotely. Some of the most commonly used information and communication technologies in the delivery of healthcare are electronic health records. These digital records are used to manage information such as a patient’s medical history, doctors’ notes and scheduled appointments. This allows healthcare workers to access a patient recorders remotely. Making technology part of routine health service delivery has a downside, however. A number of unintended consequences can come with technology-enabled health services. These include…

Headlines about molecular genetics being used to shed new light on old mysteries or even put criminals behind bars have become increasingly more common. In South Africa DNA is being used to answer important questions about everything from a group of people’s origins to the biological paternity of a child. But paternity tests aren’t just applicable to modern cases. Fellow researcher Christoff Erasmus and I considered DNA evidence to understand a divorce case dating back 321 years. The events before and after the divorce case of Maria Kickers had long-term consequences for a family with a surname that, for decades,…

I have a cellphone built into my watch. People now take this type of technology for granted, but not so long ago it was firmly in the realm of science fiction. The transition from fantasy to reality was far from the flip of a switch. The amount of time, money, talent and effort required to put a telephone on my wrist spanned far beyond any one product development cycle. The people who crossed a wristwatch with a cellphone worked hard for several years to make it happen, but technology development really occurs on a timescale of decades. While the last…

If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine. There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as faculty members doing research…

A defining characteristic of the way many people live today is persistent online connectedness. Since the introduction of smartphones about 15 years ago, the rapid and broad adoption of these devices has had an impact on people’s behaviour at all hours of the day. Forecasts suggest that the number of smartphone connections in sub-Saharan Africa will reach 678 million by the end of 2025, representing an adoption rate of 65%. Many people check their phones when they wake up, use them while travelling to work and constantly keep an eye on them while at work. A phone screen is the…

President Joe Biden’s cybersecurity executive order, signed May 12, 2021, calls for the federal government to adopt a “zero-trust architecture.” This raises a couple of questions. What is zero-trust security? And, if trust is bad for cybersecurity, why do most organizations in government and the private sector do it? One consequence of too much trust online is the ransomware epidemic, a growing global problem that affects organizations large and small. High-profile breaches such as the one experienced by the Colonial Pipeline are merely the tip of the iceberg. There were at least 2,354 ransomware attacks on local governments, health care…

At the launch of bitcoin in 2009 the size of the potential of the underlying technology, the blockchain, was not fully appreciated. What has not been fully exploited is the unique features of blockchain technology that can improve the lives of people and businesses. These include the fact that it is an open-source software. This makes its source code legally and freely available to end-users who can use it to create new products and services. Another significant feature is that it is decentralised, democratising the operation of the services built on it. Control of the services built on the blockchain…

With the proliferation of female robots such as Sophia and the popularity of female virtual assistants such as Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft), artificial intelligence seems to have a gender issue. This gender imbalance in AI is a pervasive trend that has drawn sharp criticism in the media (even Unesco warned against the dangers of this practice) because it could reinforce stereotypes about women (and female robots) being objects. But why is femininity injected in artificial intelligent objects? If we want to curb the massive use of female gendering in AI, we need to better understand the deep…

Along with its many benefits, the internet has brought the world a new risk – cybercrime. Cybercrimes are offences that intentionally harm victims in various ways using telecommunications networks. One report estimates the global annual cost of cybercrime would reach US$6 trillion at the end of 2021. It’s a major problem in Nigeria too. About N127 billion or US$649 million is lost annually to internet fraud, representing 0.08% of the country’s gross domestic product. This makes cybercrime a threat to foreign direct investment and the socio-economic development of the country. Read more: Meet the ‘Yahoo boys’ – Nigeria’s undergraduate conmen…

For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved that lifelong goal – but he wasn’t a typical astronaut. Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone. NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia – looking for sources of money post-Cold…