3 ways AI has helped the world during COVID-19 pandemic

With coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak impacted every single person and company around the world, we have changed our lifestyle inevitably. Many businesses left no choice but to shut their doors throughout the control period in order to keep their employees safe. Some are slightly fortunately where their employees are able to work remotely.

Here, it is inspiring how technology, particularly AI, has helped the world during COVID-19 pandemic.

• Relief Workload of Healthcare Institutions, Governments and Businesses
• Create Sense of Togetherness
• Understand Virus with AI

1. Relief Workload of Healthcare Institutions, Governments and Businesses

Bot, also known as Virtual Assistance, has been around for years and it has been used by businesses to improve the productivity of customer-facing departments.

Microsoft has introduced Healthcare Bot service back in Feb 2019, but has gained little attention by general public as it is designed specifically for healthcare industry to support common virtual health assistant.

However, this has changed as pandemic started to strike the world, resources of healthcare institutions and companies were being overloaded. Healthcare professions are working overtime to diagnose and carry out COVID-19 test for the suspects, and now frontline healthcare are being stretched where most of them have to work double/tripled of their normal working hours in order to fight against the time and virus.

Therefore, governments around the world and institutions were looking out for alternatives to relief the workload from healthcare workers in frontline. One of the alternatives is using Virtual Assistant to screen through and answering questions from general public.

In Singapore, National University Hospital of Singapore has launched a virtual assistant app to help doctor to retrieve vital information at their fingertips with 95% accuracy. Singapore government on the other hand launched a chat bot app to keep employers updated for the information about COVID-19.

“We’re grateful to be able to help health care organizations quickly offer their communities and patients a COVID-19 self-assessment bot based on the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service,” - Hadas Bitran, group manager of Microsoft Healthcare and head of the Healthcare Bot team.

In Europe and many parts of the world, Microsoft Healthcare Bot is being used by many healthcare institutions to help screening people for potential COVID19 infection and treatment. Ever since the outbreak, more than 1230 Microsoft Healthcare Bot-based virtual assistants have been created to serve more than 18 millions individuals.

We use Form Recognizer and Computer Vision to extract the data and pass it to IQ Bot. Then we use IQ Bot to decipher the doctor’s handwriting and populate the correct fields in the database, saving time and ensuring accuracy.

Form Recognizer, a Cognitive Service of Microsoft AI has too helped the business & healthcare workers to automate and relieving the workload by ensuring the data is captured and processed automatically.

By doing those with AI, healthcare professions can now focus on treating the patients that truly need help.

2. Create Sense of Togetherness

Many governments have implemented movement control and measures and many organizations have enforced work from home to ensure every single individual and employee is safe.

Even though video-conferencing technology are so advance to connect people up, research shows that many still experience helpless, less connected and sense of physical separations as people move to work remotely, which eventually led to meeting fatigues.

Microsoft’s Teams have took an extra step up to create a sense of togetherness for their users by working with experts in virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI) and productivity researchers.

Together mode is a new meeting experience in Teams that uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class.

Microsoft Teams’ “Together” mode uses AI segmentation technology to detect a person’s video stream, and place each of the participants virtually to a shared background in order to create a sense of togetherness and allowing users to focus on faces and body languages. With “Together” mode in different backgrounds: auditoriums, classrooms, boardroom, cafeteria & many more, users can feel more connected in a shared virtual space.

3. Understand Virus with AI

COVID-19 is one of the most challenging issues in the man-kind history. Have been months since the outbreak, yet, it is still little known about the virus.

Accurate and speedy diagnosis is critically important in order to detect patients with coronavirus and those without symptoms developed. Many coronavirus infected patients develop pneumonia which led to deadly respiratory failures.

Researchers in China are now using deep learning AI technology to train a detection model with CT scans images of COVID19 patients. Researchers claimed that the model has reduced the confirmation time by 65% and accuracy is ~95%.

Microsoft as one of the largest technology firms is also working with Adaptive to use machine learning to learn about immune response to COVID-19.

Many healthcare institutions around also leverage cloud & AI technology to find vaccines.

Our takeaways

As a technology enthusiast whom is passionate about cloud and AI technology, I definitely love to see how AI helps the world to fight against COVID19 and future challenges.

By reading this, we have learnt the 3 ways AI has helped the world during COVID-19 pandemic.

I write about AI and cloud technologies. Follow me on www.techconnect.io and medium if you’re passionate about technology like me.