How Artificial Intelligence is Helping Fight the Pandemic

With total coronavirus cases passing the nine million mark, the COVID-19 pandemic has put an unprecedented pressure on the global economies and stretched the limited healthcare resources too thin.

To help get through these troubled times, the healthtech industry is rising to the challenge and offering its advancements in the most promising technology — artificial intelligence. With the ability to analyze huge amounts of data, process human speech, recognize objects and faces, artificial intelligence can become our ace card in the battle against the pandemic. It can significantly relieve the strain by helping with diagnosing, monitoring, and even drug discovery.

With AI development services being in high demand today, let’s see how the technology can drive a positive impact.

Intelligent triage

One of the major problems with coronavirus is its exponential growth. Hospitals are already overwhelmed as the numbers of coronavirus patients are escalating on a daily basis. To help care providers boost capacity, dorms, hotels, exhibition centers, and convention halls are now converted into coronavirus field hospitals.

Artificial intelligence can significantly improve pre-hospital triage to deal with the influx of patients more effectively. Removing the need for physical contact, an AI-driven video-based telehealth solution can be used to perform online screening, assess the risk of a patient suffering from COVID-19 and determine further actions, whether it’s relevant recommendations, a virtual consult, or referral to a local medical facility.

Tech companies are helping hospitals by launching coronavirus self-checkers — AI-powered healthcare bots that ask a series of questions to determine whether your symptoms are related to COVID-19 and your need to seek medical care. These bots can also provide accurate, clinically-vetted information about coronavirus and protection measures and keep people informed on the current situation, any lockdowns and closings.

Real-time temperature screening

o contain the spread of the highly contagious virus, it is critically important to monitor and screen the population in real time to identify who might be affected. However, traditional manual temperature checks can hardly be performed at the scale and speed needed, let alone the risk of cross-infection.

Tech giants in China, which was hit first, were quick with their digital response to the challenge. Baidu introduced an AI-powered temperature screening system that leverages infrared sensors to identify individuals with a fever in a passenger flow, prompting staff to perform secondary checks. With the ability to screen hundreds of passers-by per minute from a distance of several meters, the system is successfully used at major railway stations.