The company has used artificial intelligence to create a chatbot that carries out a rapid test via WhatsApp and refers the patient for remote medical attention. The next step is to transform it into an app.
With the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring Covid-19 a global pandemic and the number of people infected in Chile increasing, Cognitiva, a Santiago-based company established in 2016 that develops solutions using artificial intelligence (AI), put aside its plans and set itself an urgent goal: to develop a solution to help detect patients infected with coronavirus.
Cognitiva’s creator and general manager, Aldo Marzolo, explains that they worked to create a chatbot with AI that uses WhatsApp or Internet to perform a quick test with questions to detect whether a person has the coronavirus symptoms. The test is already available for public use on Cognitiva’s website. “The idea is that this digital service serves to decompress patient mobility and prioritize the most urgent cases,” he says.
To confirm whether the symptoms correspond to the virus, the chatbot has the ability to refer the patient for a remote medical consultation by videoconference. This part of the solution is not yet available, but Marzolo reports that Cognitiva has already presented the solution to the Health Ministry and closed an agreement with a private health center in San Fernando, 140 kilometers from Santiago, to apply the solution with its doctors. In this way, it will be possible to decongest health services and avoid contagion due to crowds, he says.
Within the next few days, Cognitiva expects to complete a mobile application that, in addition to the chatbot, will be able to monitor cases via notifications. “As well as diagnosis and referral, it will focus on monitoring. The idea is that health services have the app and assign the doctors and, as patients arrive, they are referred and the result is traceable, making it possible to contact people and control their quarantine by, for example, sending notifications to see if they are complying,” explains Marzolo.
Marzolo says that the solution for the detection of the coronavirus is an adaptation of an earlier development together with ChileRad. This is a system that digitizes the triage protocol, a classification used by doctors to determine patients’ symptoms and their seriousness in order to prioritize care.
“In the case of the system to combat coronavirus, this served to prioritize and identify whether users are likely to have the disease or not,” he says.
Marzolo points out that the triage system is part of a more global solution known as Cognitive Digital Doctor, which has three other functionalities that use AI: a system of visual recognition of medical images that permits the classification and recognition of pathologies, a system of referral for medical tests and a system for booking appointments.
To find out more about innovation and investment opportunities in Chile, see this article.
Source: Diario Financiero