Role of AI soars in tackling Covid-19 pandemic

For the first time in a pandemic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a role like never before in areas ranging from diagnosing risk to doubt-clearing, from delivery of services to drug discovery in tackling the Covid-19 outbreak. While BlueDoT, a Canadian health monitoring firm that crunches flight data and news reports using AI, is being credited by international reports to be the first to warn its clients of an impending outbreak on December 31, beating countries and international developmental agencies, the Indian tech space too is buzzing with coronavirus cracking activities. CoRover, a start-up in the AI space that has earlier developed chatbots for railways ticketing platform, has now created a "video-bot" by collaborating with a doctor from Fortis Healthcare. In this platform, a real doctor from Fortis Healthcare -- not a cartoon or an invisible knowledge bank -- will take questions from people about Covid-19. Apollo Hospitals has come up with a risk assessment scanner for Covid-19, which is available in six languages and guides people about the potential risk of having the virus. The Jaipur-based Sawai Man Singh Hospital is trying out a robot, made by robot maker Club First, to serve food and medicines to patients to lower the exposure of health workers to coronavirus patients.