How Technology Is Helping in the Fight Against Coronavirus: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Drones and Robots

Source: John Hopkins University

Before the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China on January 9, BlueDot, a Canadian health monitoring company had already warned its clients of the outbreak on December 31. The company uses an AI (Artificial Intelligence)-driven algorithm that scraps foreign-language news reports, forums and blogs, and announcements from public health officials to give its customers early warning of possible outbreaks of Coronavirus in areas like Wuhan.

By analyzing global airline ticketing data, BlueDot correctly predicted that the virus would go from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial outbreak by monitoring where the infected residents are headed next.

AI surveillance tools such as BlueDots have been available in public health for more than a decade. For example, HealthMap, founded by a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2006. Working with researchers from the University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, Oxford Martin School and Tsing Hua University, it delivers real-time updates on the spread of the Coronavirus.

While machine learning is very good at identifying patterns in the data, it still needs a lot of data to deliver close to real-time information for public health officials to monitor and respond to the crisis. The millions of posts about Coronavirus on social media and news sites are allowing algorithms to generate more accurate data to predict how far and how fast outbreaks will spread.