How Artificial Intelligence is being used to tackle Corona virus.
The rapid spread of COVID’19 is causing trepidation among the people all over the world. Let’s see how Artificial Intelligence is being employed to tackle such chaos.
“A year spent in Artificial Intelligence is enough to make one believe in God” — Alan Perlis (Turing Prize Awardee 1965)
Protein Discovery and Drug Development .
Understanding the protein’s structure can provide information about how the virus functions, but experiments may take months or longer to find out such insights. To speed up things Google Deepmind’s AlphaMind System and China’s LinearFold systems has engaged to do this work.
The LinearFold system has significantly reduced the time taken to predict the RNA of virus up to a mere 27 second. Although the the results of their predictions has not been made public yet but efforts are made from all these tech giants to find the antidote.
Robots for Environment Disinfection and Staff Assistance.
China’s investment in Artificial Intelligence has paid off. As in the critical situation like corona disease outbreak china has employed robots to help the paramedic as well as the local government.
Various robots have been utilized to serve this purpose.
Autonomous Disinfecting Robots
Robots have been used in hospital to disinfect the surrounding. This robots use Ultraviolet lights to disinfect the environment. They are being used to disinfect the Operation rooms, patient wards and alleys of the hospital. These robots can kill every bacteria that comes in contact with it.
Robot Carts for Food Delivery in hospitals.
Robot carts are used to deliver foods in the hospitals for the infected patients. This eliminates the risk of the paramedics to be affected. These robots are designed to do simple task like to transport food as well as medicines from one place to other in a hospital.
This robots are also being used in hotels, restaurants, cruise ships to provide essential daily materials for the quarantined people.
Forecasting and prediction of outbreak.
It was an Artificial Intelligence company that saw this epidemic coming. A Canadian based company called as BlueDot which already predicted the outbreak of this infectious disease and alerted all the people around the world, but still it took another 9 days for the World Health Organization to officially red flag this. Until this action the virus has already been spread.
This wasn’t the only system to first notice such outbreak, HealthMap a system at boston Children’s Hospital also caught these first signs.
Imagine how many lives this could have saved if the systems alerts had been taken seriously by the government and global authorities. The system had already predicted the spread of corona from china to other countries but everyone was skeptical about this, and in the end due to ignorance it has spread to more than 180 countries. And it all comes to the saying “Prevention is better than cure”.
Faster Screening of Patients using thermal Imaging.
Screening of thousands of people is a great task. And to find the infected person is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Hence, in this epidemic the thermal cameras are being used for screening of people.
When the cameras detect the unusual body temperature they directly map the face of the affected person and alert the responsible authorities to take action for isolation of the ward. These screening technology are being used at public places like airports, railway stations,crowded streets, etc
Smart System of Corona Virus Detection.
The tech giant Alibaba in china has already claimed it can detect the corona infected patients at an astonishing speed which is just under 20 seconds based on the computerized tomography scans of the patients. It was first introduced in Qiboshan Hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan province.
Usually it takes about 10–15 mins for a doctor to screen a suspected patient for the Corona virus, but using the system the time was reduced to a mere 10–15 seconds per person with an accuracy of about 96%. This could help in screening thousands for patients in such a less amount of time.
Drones to the rescue.
The Automatic, Unmanned, Autonomous Drones are being used to transport the samples as well as the necessary high emergency medicines from one place to another. This drones were recently utilized at the Xinchang County People’s Hospital and Xinchang County’s disease control center to transport the infected samples to the checkup center.
This system increases the transport speed by 50% and then it reduces the risk of the people to get contact with the infected samples.
Chat bots in action.
Chatbots are becoming an information provider in this hour of outbreak. To make the people feel safe and clear their doubts related to this pandemic chat bots are answering the questions on the go. Bebot is one such chat bot service that is offering assistance to the people. This has lead to decrease in panic among the common people and a global social awakening about the disease. Also the preventive measures are being answered by the system.
