Tech fights the coronavirus
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The novel coronavirus that first appeared in China and it’s now all over the world, the current (9 March 2020) status is as below:
The coronavirus is putting a lot of new tech, including robots and artificial intelligence, on display. The world of AI and robotics have made huge strides in the last few years and are ready for the challenge. This virus has become a test for the limits of the technology and also a proof that technology can help us win the war against global pandemics like the COVID 19.
The following is a quick summary of the highlights!
AI
The power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been shown during the initial phases of the coronavirus outbreak. AI flagged an early warning about the outbreak, and algorithms have been used over flight data to predict the novel coronavirus spread.
Leading in this field are the analytics companies Metabiota and BlueDot who use publicly available health data as the input for their AI engines. The Canadian company BlueDot, which runs “automated infectious disease surveillance,” alerted its customers about a rapidly spreading infectious disease by at the end of December, way before CDC or WHO started warning people.
BlueDot’s founder, Kamran Khan, explained how the company uses AI that leverages natural-language processing and machine learning, to track over 100 infectious diseases by parsing and analyzing more than 100,000 articles in 65 languages every day. Now, the same algorithms are used to monitor social media and other news content to detect the disease’s spread.
At the same time, the coronavirus scare has pushed drug companies to accelerate their research on AI based drug discovery tools. AI can be used on such platforms to find entirely new molecules capable of treating the COVID 19 related disease, or analyze large data of approved medicine that might also work.
Robots
With a virus like the COVID 19 that spreads primarily through contact robots are godsend. The robot tech of 2020 is at a stage where it can handle this challenge head on, for instance, in US a robot helped doctors treat a person with the coronavirus. The robot used a stethoscope and also was the conduit for communications between the patient and the medical staff limiting the exposure to the virus.
Chinese hospitals are using robots from the Danish company UVD Robots. These robots are specialized for high exposure risk tasks such as disinfecting patient rooms and operating rooms. These roving robots emit ultraviolet light over an area, killing viruses and bacteria, including the coronavirus. The robots are remotely controlled by a device operated by hospital staff.
Other uses of the robots have been more as mechanical beasts.
