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 attention?
For starters, you try to figure out a way to connect people across languages, including translating sometimes vague and culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terminology that doctors can understand to quickly assess a patient’s condition and decide the level of urgency. Then there’s the issue of figuring out the formulation for prescriptions created in one country and how that might translate into medicines available in the prescribing country. Also you need to put in place a monitoring or tracking system that’s able to flag potential outbreaks before they spread at the event.
Those were the challenges facing organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, who knew they would have to address health issues facing over 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and para-athletes from over 150 countries and regions speaking 25 different languages. To help them solve it, organizers turned to a Silicon Valley-based company, Humetrix, that had created an award-winning Global Health Communicator based on the medical information databases it’s assembled over the past 15 years.
Led by Dr. Bettina Experton, Humetrix has developed health-related data and analytics systems, including a population-based health analytics system that allowed the government to track and predict outbreaks of the coronavirus among 20 million Medicare recipients and enabled the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to identify areas in the US to send vaccines and other support 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 could use to start the process of getting medical care from first aid stations set up at the 200 competition venues in Paris and from 20,000 physicians and hospitals contracted to help the games provide care, Experton said. Patients scanned a QR code, got access to a secure mobile app, entered their medical information in their own language, selected their medications from their own country and then let the system translate for them.
To help those patients, doctors had access to a database of 4 million worldwide medications and vaccines and information on 67,000 medical conditions that could be triggered by over 4,000 symptoms. Again, all of that information was translated into 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, German, Korean, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.
All of that had to be done while ensuring patients’ medical information remained confidential and secure, which meant no remote storage of personal health info in the cloud or sharing of personally identifiable information with monitoring systems.
“Saves us time, increases the efficiency of triage,” said one paramedic lead at the Paris Summer Games. A Paris-based primary care physician and volunteer at Paris Summer Games first aid stations stated, “Simply love it — now using it for my non-French speaking patients in our clinic.” Some hospitals even expanded this technology to all patients as part of their intake workflow, while some paramedics in the Paris region added Humetrix QR code posters inside their ambulances.
At 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 push of a button. Using GPS location, Humetrix will automatically translate and speak symptoms, medications and other pertinent health information into the local language, of which 25 languages are available. In these situations, AI is combined with human and clinician intelligence (i.e., fact-checked) to ensure that all translations make sense and utilize the correct expressions when voice-to-voice communication is employed.
With its database of 4 million medicinal products worldwide, Humetrix’s technology can help you find something as seemingly simple as Tylenol in a different country that doesn’t carry that exact drug but has another of a different name with the same active ingredients. However if a particular medication is unavailable at your current location, Humetrix will notify you.
Why wasn’t this voice technology utilized at the Olympics? Since the Olympics occur in a public setting, vocalizing personal health information where others may overhear would be a privacy concern. However in a closed-door exam room at a hospital, voice-to-voice capabilities can streamline conversation and, as a result, diagnosis.
Remaining consistent, no personal information is stored in the cloud but is local on the user’s phone. The population-based health analytics system used by Humetrix was paused after the Paralympics but can be reenabled depending on the use case.
This technology is available B2B, and its design merits use by the travel or healthcare industries, global organizers (such as those hosting international sports events) and governments. As Humetrix proved during the Summer Olympic Games, its technology can successfully be harnessed to track symptoms and monitor the spread of disease, which could prove especially useful during another global disease outbreak.
Health has previously been a barrier to travel, preventing many from experiencing new cultures in the name of accessible medical care. However with technology like this bridging gaps in international healthcare, these obstacles to accessing our global community may soon be no more. Information is power, especially regarding our health — and that shouldn’t be limited based on where you are in the world or what language you speak.
Source: CNET
