The World Health Organisation on 30th January 2020, declared the Novel Coronavirus epidemic an international public health emergency, exactly 21 days after it released a global notice about the potential outbreak. During this time China has identified over 7,700 confirmed cases and witnessed over 200 fatalities.

WHO, officially notified about the Wuhan outbreak on 9th January 2020, while the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention was made aware of the potential outbreak on 6th January 2020. While the agility of all parties working to control, the situation is absolutely commendable, we could probably have covered more ground (approximately a week’s worth of time), had we immediately acted on the warnings raised by BlueDot.

Artificial Intelligence start-ups have long been working on solutions for the Healthcare industry and once such company is BlueDot, a Canada based digital health company, that predicate the first warning signs of the potential outbreak a week prior to the official notification. The company uses Machine Learning and natural language processing techniques to analyses news reports in websites, government documents, and information on plant and animal disease networks, etc. to predict the outbreak.

The company was also able to predict the countries that would be high risk based on global airline ticketing data. The firm was accurately able to forecast Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo as high-risk countries. Similarly, Hong Kong based SenseTime is supporting officials accurately identify patients with fever in a crowd using its deep learning platform based on face recognition technology

The company is one of 416 AI-based start-ups on our WhatNext platform that are working on various solutions for the healthcare industry.

Geographical Split of AI Start-Up Focused on Healthcare Sector

AI-based companies can not only help in predicting outbreaks but also in:

• Quick Diagnosis of Symptoms
• Identify High-Risk Patients
• AI-Enabled Research for Vaccines and Potential Treatments
• Remote Monitoring of Patients and Predicting Risk Level
• AI-Based Rapid Response Management etc

Snapshot of some of the interesting companies that we have on our platform

* Key reason for fatality due to Novel coronavirus is the existence of other health ailments and not just the ailment.

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