How AI is Helping Track and Limit the Spread of COVID-19

WHILE the news media and politicians have focused on the hunt for a vaccine to end the Covid pandemic, Artificial Intelligence has also been hard at work. The search for a vaccine is clearly at the front of people’s minds, understandably so, but the AI community of researchers and developers have been doing their part in the fight against the novel virus in lockstep with their pharmacological colleagues.

This has been especially true with the essential work in contact tracing aimed at identifying those who may have been exposed to the virus and keeping it contained. Machine learning has been key to this battle, with absolutely vast amounts of data being collected and collated to seek patterns which can then be used to give policy and decisionmakers good information to work with.

This use of Bug Data, as it is known, relies on Artificial Intelligence to process the raw material and make predictions on potential future outcomes – and the more data that is fed into the machines, the better the level of accuracy of the results. Initial work was conducted by Canadian AI from BlueDot, which developed an AI program designed to predict infectious disease and track their spread. Working with epidemiologists and hundreds of thousands of reports, the program alerted the world to the coronavirus.

AI then came into its own with developing contact tracing apps for smartphones. While there are related issues surrounding privacy and potential ethical problems over misuse of the data, the apps have helped identify individuals at risk and discover contagion hotspots.

Smartglasses capable of monitoring people’s temperatures from a distance have also been employed by security guards, enabling whole crowds of people to be scanned quickly and non-invasively to identify anyone with an unusually high temperature, a potential flag for being a carrier of the virus. This tool cut the need for physical contact or proximity to others dramatically, keeping people safe from infection.

AI is being employed in the medical arena too, helping doctors process X-ray scans much more rapidly than can be done by even highly skilled radiologists, looking for telltale signs of lung damage caused by the virus.

And robots controlled by AI interfaces – whether drones or on the ground machines - are being used to help minimize unnecessary contact in high risk areas such as hospitals between patients and health professionals, whether the machines are spraying disinfectant, delivering meals or checking for fevers among countless other tasks.

While many issues – particularly around the ethics of how Big Data is collected, stored and used – still have much to be worked out to find the balance between an individual’s right to privacy and society’s need for solutions to problems such as the pandemic – AI is here to stay and is making a difference in the battle to save lives.