Companies around the world are having to look at new ways of safely continuing business as we adapt to the “new normal” of life with the coronavirus.

Amazon has used its AI expertise to create what it calls the Distance Assistant. Using a time-of-flight sensor, often found in modern smartphones, the AI measures the distance between employees.

The AI is used to differentiate people from their background and what it sees is displayed on a 50-inch screen for workers to quickly see whether they’re adhering to keeping a safe distance.

Augmented reality is used to overlay either a green or red circle underneath each employee. As you can probably guess – a green circle means that the employee is a safe distance from others, while a red circle indicates that person needs to give others some personal space.

The whole solution is run locally and does not require access to the cloud to function. Amazon says it’s only deployed Distance Assistant in a handful of facilities so far but plans to roll out “hundreds” more “over the next few weeks.”

While the solution appears rather draconian, it’s a clever – and arguably necessary – way of helping to keep people safe until a vaccine for the virus is hopefully found. However, it will strengthen concerns that the coronavirus will be used to normalise increased surveillance and erode privacy.

Amazon claims it will be making Distance Assistant open-source to help other companies adapt to the coronavirus pandemic and keep their employees safe.

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The AI-powered tool is able to analyse CT scans for signs of COVID-19 infection to help quickly diagnose the novel coronavirus which has caused havoc around the world.

With heroic medical staff under more pressure than ever caring for the huge influx of people suffering with COVID-19 – in addition to all the other ailments they have to treat – such an AI-powered tool could help to free up significant amounts of time.

M3 has been testing the solution in Japan since the end of March; with the aim of deploying it across hundreds of locations. 

Hospitals will send CT scans to M3’s system which will then return the results with a 1-5 scale indicating the likelihood of COVID-19 pneumonia.

Alibaba’s system has been used in Chinese hospitals – including in Wuhan, the expected source of the COVID-19 outbreak – for a while now. The Chinese tech giant claims its AI can diagnose COVID-19 within 20 seconds with an accuracy of 90 percent or higher.

On average, a doctor takes around 20 minutes to make a diagnosis once a CT scan is available. M3 has found that the system typically diagnoses in under a minute.

While finding the accuracy to be relatively high, M3 reports the accuracy falls short of the 90 percent claimed by Alibaba. Even at 90 percent, 100 patients in every 1000 risk being misdiagnosed.

However, reading COVID-19 scans is reportedly even tricky for skilled physicians – especially as the virus is still relatively new. An AI-powered system which frees up clinical time is sure to be welcomed by all hospitals.

Catching the smaller signs of COVID-19 early could even help with providing treatment to those who need it before they get seriously ill.

This isn’t the first time AI has been looked to for assistance in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this week, researchers from WVU Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute said they were able to predict the onset of COVID-19 symptoms three days early using AI to analyse data from Oura’s wearable rings.

Back in April, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University launched an AI-powered voice analysis system which aims to determine whether someone is suffering from COVID-19 using just a website.

While it seems likely we’re going to be living with COVID-19 in our lives for the foreseeable future, AI technologies look ready to step in and help.

(Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash)

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The researchers, from WVU Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, first announced the potentially groundbreaking project in April.

At the time, the researchers found they could predict COVID-19 symptoms – including fever, cough, and fatigue – up to 24 hours before their onset.

“The holistic and integrated neuroscience platform developed by the RNI continuously monitors the human operating system, which allows for the accurate prediction of the onset of viral infection symptoms associated with COVID-19,” said Ali Rezai, M.D., executive chair of the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute.

“We feel this platform will be integral to protecting our healthcare workers, first responders, and communities as we adjust to life in the COVID-19 era.”

Participants in the study were asked to log neurological symptoms like stress and anxiety in an app. The Oura ring, meanwhile, automatically tracks physiological data like body temperature, heart rate, and sleep patterns.

“We are hopeful that Oura’s technology will advance how people identify and understand our body’s most nuanced physiological signals and warning signs, as they relate to infectious diseases like COVID-19,” explained Harpreet Rai, CEO of Oura Health.

“Partnering with the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute on this important study helps fulfil Oura’s vision of offering data for the public good and empowering individuals with the personal insights needed to lead healthier lives.”  

Using an AI prediction model, the researchers have improved their ability to track COVID-19 symptoms from 24 hours before their onset to three days.

The accuracy rate for the current system is 90 percent. While impressive, that does mean 100 people in every 1000 patients could be misdiagnosed if such a system was widely rolled out.

This isn’t the only research into the use of wearables to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic – Fitbit is also conducting a large study into whether its popular wearables can detect markers which may indicate that a user is infected with the novel coronavirus and should therefore quarantine and seek a professional test.

With the COVID-19 pandemic looking set to disrupt our lives for the foreseeable future, it seems AI and wearables provide some hope of diagnosing cases earlier, limiting reinfection, and helping people return to some degree of normality.

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COVID-19 knows no borders and has resulted in around 75,896 deaths as of writing. People around the world are hoping AI can deliver solutions for tackling the coronavirus which has wrecked social and economic havoc.

AI News has already covered work from predominantly Asian tech firms including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Daergen, and Insilico Medicine, but more and more Western companies are stepping up with solutions.

Nvidia

Nvidia was among the first Western tech giants to offer up some of its substantial resources towards fighting COVID-19. Last month, it gave COVID-19 researchers free access to its Parabricks genome-sequencing software.

27,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs are also powering IBM’s Summit supercomputer which researchers were able to use to simulate 8,000 compounds in a matter of days and identify 77 small-molecule compounds, such as medications and natural compounds, that have shown the potential to impair COVID-19’s ability to dock with and infect host cells.

This week, Nvidia announced that it’s joined the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. The consortium brings together leaders from the US government, industry, and academia, and supports researchers by providing access to 30 supercomputers with over 400 petaflops of compute performance.

Nvidia, for its part, will contribute its expertise to the consortium in areas such as AI,  supercomputing, drug discovery, molecular dynamics, genomics, medical imaging, and data analytics.

“The COVID-19 HPC Consortium is the Apollo Program of our time,” said Ian Buck, VP and GM of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia. “Not a race to the moon, this is a race for humanity. The rocket ships are GPU supercomputers, and their fuel is scientific knowledge. NVIDIA is going to help by making these rockets travel as fast as they can.”

Nvidia has also packaged COVID-19 tools on NGC, the company’s hub for GPU-accelerated software. All of the COVID-19 tools on NGC are publicly available.

IBM

IBM has also been active in providing tools and expertise in the fight against COVID-19 and helped to launch the aforementioned COVID-19 HPC Consortium.

Last month, IBM launched COVID-19 data in its Weather Channel app to provide access to detailed virus tracking. The company also merged its Micromedex online medication reference database with EBSCO’s DynaMed peer-reviewed clinical content to form a single comprehensive resource with the goal of improving clinical decision-making.

Our sister publication Developer reported on IBM’s Call for Code initiative expanding to include COVID-19 solutions last week. By tapping into IBM’s vast developer community and offering “starter kits” consisting of relevant tools, innovators from around the world can quickly get to work building potentially lifesaving solutions.

IBM has made two new COVID-19 announcements over the past week.

The first is an AI deep search tool which takes reputable data from the White House, a coalition of research groups, and licensed databases from the DrugBank, Clinicaltrials.gov and GenBank. Researchers can use IBM’s tool to quickly extract critical knowledge regarding COVID-19 from the large collection of papers.

IBM will also make its Functional Genomics Platform available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform is a cloud-based repository and research tool which includes genes, proteins, and other molecular targets, and is built to discover the molecular features of viral and bacterial genomes. Using the platform, researchers can accelerate the discovery of molecular targets required for drug design, test development, and treatment.

So there we have some of the latest AI solutions from Nvidia and IBM designed to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic we’re all facing. We’ll keep you posted on further tools and developments that may be of assistance.

Stay safe, stay home where possible, and thank you to all key workers and researchers helping to get us out the other side of this faster.

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Governments around the world are racing to obtain sufficient and effective testing kits to diagnose COVID-19. The current widely-used test requires a thin cotton swab to be put up the nasal cavity and reach to the back of the throat. It’s not a painful procedure, but it’s invasive and uncomfortable.

COVID-19 tests which only require a finger prick are starting to be rolled out but obtaining sufficient numbers of any test is proving difficult. On Tuesday, British cabinet minister Michael Gove said the UK was being hindered by the global shortage of chemical reagents needed for testing.

If the researchers from Carnegie Mellon are successful, a test that could be taken at home instantly could be rolled out. While it’s unlikely to ever be as accurate as a full test, it could help to prioritise where limited resources should be allocated and determine which households are more likely to be suffering from seasonal flu.

Speaking to Futurism, Benjamin Striner, a graduate working on the project, said: “I’ve seen a lot of competition for the cheapest, fastest diagnosis you can have.”

“And there are some pretty good ones that are actually really cheap and pretty accurate, but nothing’s ever going to be as cheap and as easy as speaking into a phone.”

Coronavirus is a respiratory illness and therefore affects breathing patterns and other vital parameters. The AI system analyses a person’s voice and provides a score on the likelihood that the individual has coronavirus based on markers observed from known sufferers.

The researchers are currently asking both healthy and infected people to share a recording of their voice to help improve the algorithm.

Yours truly has already submitted his voice. The process takes around five minutes and requires the following seven steps:

• Submit basic demographic information.
• Cough three times.
• Say ‘a’ for as long as you can.
• Say ‘o’ for as long as you can.
• Say ‘e’ for as long as you can.
• Count to 20.
• Say the alphabet.

Be aware the app is still in its early stages and is not yet approved by agencies like the FDA or CDC. The app should also not be used as a substitute for a proper medical test or examination if you’re concerned you may have COVID-19.

If you’re interested, you can access the COVID Voice Detector here.

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British PM Boris Johnson said he wanted to avoid the draconian measures in place in other countries if possible. However, if coronavirus cases and deaths continue to climb – as people fail to follow advice – then he’d be left with no option.

Images of Brits continuing to hit the pub and other large gatherings, putting the lives of themselves and others at risk, were rightly condemned and led to a national lockdown in the UK this week.

Research conducted by Vivacity Labs, a startup focused on traffic surveillance systems, sought to determine whether more people were staying at home last week compared to the week commencing February 3rd.

Vivacity Labs observed just a 30 percent drop in pedestrians. Car and motorcycle traffic dropped even less, at just a pitiful 15 percent. The number of cyclists declined a mere 13 percent.

The company’s findings were based on its network of 200 sensors installed across 10 UK cities.

So, did people at least space themselves further apart? The company’s findings in Oxford suggest nowhere near enough.

Using a network of 78 sensors owned by Oxford Council, Vivacity Labs noted a drop in pedestrians of 48 percent. This is better than the relatively small drop in traffic, but the firm only noted 28 percent fewer interactions between pedestrians over two meters apart.

With a police-enforced lockdown now in place and many venues closed, it seems fellow Brits are finally getting the message to stay home wherever possible.

Hopefully, enough people will now listen to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus spread to save lives and start lifting restrictions. If not, the UK could end up seeing much stricter measures seen in other countries like requiring written permission to leave their households and military personnel on the streets for enforcement.

(Photo by Rohan G on Unsplash)

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