This AI Tool Lets Doctors and Traveling Patients Converse, Despite Language Barriers
What happens when millions of people gather for a global event in a country where they may not speak the language but suddenly need medical care?
First, you try to figure out a way to connect people who speak different languages, including translating sometimes vague and culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terms that doctors can understand to quickly assess the patient’s condition and determine the degree of urgency. . The next problem is figuring out the prescription formula created in one country and how to translate it into a drug available in the country where it was prescribed. Additionally, you will need to have a monitoring or tracking system in place that can flag potential outbreaks before they spread at your event.
These are the challenges facing organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, who know they must address the health concerns faced by more than 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and Paralympians from more than 150 countries and speaking 25 different languages . To help them solve this problem, organizers turned to a Silicon Valley-based company, Humexa company that created an award-winning global health communicator based on a database of medical information collected over the past 15 years.
Led by Dr. Bettina Experton, Humetrix develops health-related data and analytics systems, including a population-based health analytics system that enables the government to track and predict coronavirus outbreaks among 20 million Medicare beneficiaries and enables The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center will identify areas to provide vaccines and other support to the United States during the 2020 pandemic.
For the Olympics, Experton and her team created a mobile app, powered in part by a generative AI chatbot, that international visitors can use to start first aid stations set up at 200 competition venues in Paris and from other countries. Get medical care at the first aid station. Epton said 20,000 doctors and hospitals have signed up to help provide care for the games. Patients scan the QR code to access the secure mobile app, enter medical information in their own language, select medications in their own country, and let the system translate it for them.
To help these patients, doctors have access to a global database of 4 million drugs and vaccines, as well as information on 67,000 medical conditions that may cause more than 4,000 symptoms. Again, all this information is translated into 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, German, Korean, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.
All of this must be done while keeping patient medical information confidential and secure, which means personal health information cannot be stored remotely in the cloud or personally identifiable information shared with monitoring systems.
“It saves us time and improves triage efficiency,” said one head of nursing at the Paris Summer Olympics. “Love it so much—it’s now used by non-French-speaking patients in our clinic,” said a Paris primary care physician and first-aid station volunteer at the Paris Summer Olympics. Some hospitals are even extending the technology to all patients as part of their admissions As part of the process, some paramedics in the Paris region have added Humetrix QR code posters to their ambulances.
exist CES this week In Las Vegas, Humetrix plans to expand its global health platform by adding voice-to-voice capabilities that will allow patients to better communicate with medical and pharmaceutical providers at the touch of a button. Using GPS positioning, Humetrix automatically translates and speaks symptoms, medications and other relevant health information into the local language, with 25 languages available. In these cases, AI is combined with human and clinician intelligence (i.e., fact-checked) to ensure that all translations make sense and use the correct expressions when employing voice-to-voice communications.
With a global database of 4 million medicines, Humetrix’s technology can help you find a seemingly simple drug like Tylenol in a different country, but that country doesn’t carry that drug and instead has another with the same activity Ingredients of different names of drugs. However, Humetrix will notify you if a specific drug is not available at your current location.
Why aren’t the Olympics using this voice technology? Because the Olympics take place in public, speaking out personal health information where others may overhear would pose a privacy concern. However, in a hospital’s closed exam room, speech-to-speech capabilities can simplify conversations and therefore diagnoses.
To remain consistent, any personal information is not stored in the cloud, but locally on the user’s phone. The population-based health analytics system used by Humetrix was suspended after the Paralympics but could be reactivated depending on the use case.
The technology can be used in B2B and is designed for use by the travel or healthcare industries, global organizers (such as those hosting international sporting events) and governments. As Humetrix demonstrated during the Summer Olympics, its technology can be successfully used to track symptoms and monitor the spread of disease, which could be particularly useful during another global disease outbreak.
Health has previously been a barrier to travel, preventing many people from experiencing new cultures in the name of available medical services. However, these barriers to entry into our global community may soon disappear as such technologies bridge gaps in international healthcare. Information is power, especially when it comes to our health—and information should not be limited because of where you are in the world or what language you speak.
