This AI tool allows traveling doctors and patients to 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?

For starters, she’s trying to figure out a way to connect people across languages, including translating sometimes ambiguous, culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terms that doctors can understand to quickly assess a patient’s condition and determine the level of urgency. Then there is the issue of knowing what formulation of prescriptions has been created in one country and how that can be translated into medicines available in the country prescribing the prescriptions. You also need to create a monitoring or tracking system capable of flagging potential outbreaks before they spread to the event.

These were the challenges facing organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, who knew they would have to address health issues faced by more than 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and para-athletes from more than 150 countries and territories who speak 25 different languages. To help them solve this problem, the organizers turned to a Silicon Valley-based company, Humitrixwhich created the award-winning Global Health Communicator software based on databases of medical information compiled over the past 15 years.

Humetrix, led by Dr. Bettina Experton, developed health-related data and analytics systems, including a population-based health analytics system that allowed the government to track and predict coronavirus outbreaks among 20 million Medicare recipients and enable the Joint Department of Defense. 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 an innovative AI-powered chatbot, that international visitors can use to begin the process of obtaining medical care from first aid stations set up at 200 competition venues in Paris and from whom it has been contracted, Experton said. With 20,000 doctors and hospitals to help games provide care. Patients scanned a QR code, were able to access a secure mobile app, enter their medical information in their own language, choose their medications from their country and then let the system translate for them.

To help these patients, doctors have access to a database of 4 million medications and vaccines worldwide and information on 67,000 medical conditions that can result from more than 4,000 symptoms. Once again, all this information has been translated into 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, German, Korean, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.

All of this had to be done while ensuring that patients’ medical information remained confidential and secure, which meant not storing personal health information remotely in the cloud or sharing personally identifiable information with monitoring systems.

“It saves us time and increases the efficiency of triage,” said a senior paramedic at the Paris Summer Games. “I simply love it – I now use it for my non-French-speaking patients in our clinic,” said a Paris-based primary care physician who volunteers at the Paris Summer Games first aid stations. Some hospitals have even expanded this technology to include all patients as part of their workflow, while some paramedics in the Paris region have added Humetrix QR code stickers inside their ambulances.

in CES this week And 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 with the push of a button. Using GPS location, Humetrix will automatically translate and speak your symptoms, medications, and other relevant health information into the local language, of which 25 languages ​​are available. In these situations, AI is combined with human and physician intelligence (i.e. fact checking) to ensure that all translations make sense and use the correct expressions when using voice communication.

With its database of 4 million medical products worldwide, Humetrix 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 name with the same active ingredients. However, if a particular medication is not available in your current location, Humetrix will notify you.

Why wasn’t this audio technology used in the Olympics? Because the Olympics are held in a public place, uttering personal health information where others might hear it would be a privacy concern. However, in a closed hospital exam room, voice-to-voice capabilities can simplify conversation and, as a result, diagnosis.

In order to maintain consistency, 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 temporarily shut down after the Paralympics but could be re-enabled depending on the use case.

This technology is available between businesses, and its design merits use by 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 harnessed 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 from experiencing new cultures in the name of accessible medical care. But with technology like this bridging the gaps in international healthcare, these obstacles to reaching our global community may soon disappear. Information is power, especially when it comes to our health – and that shouldn’t be limited to where you are in the world or what language you speak.