By Unique Kumar Mental Health: There is a sincere need to improve mental health, As per the reports available, it is estimated by the WHO World health organization, the burden of mental health to the tune of 2443 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per 100, 000 population, and the age-adjusted suicide rate is 21.1. Between 2012 & 2030, the health conditions are pegged at 1.03 trillion dollars. Similarly, the mental health survey, 2016 estimated that over 85% of people with common mental disorders such as depression or anxiety disorder and 73.6% of people with mental disorders such as psychosis or bipolar disorder. Interestingly the ideal psychiatrist rate is 1:8000 to 10,000 but actual figures stand at 1:2,00,000 and this is a huge gap. It is not possible to fill the vacancies by employing more and more people & the way to address the problem is only possible by leveraging technology and use Artificial Intelligence, Automation with help of Mobile apps to improve mental health.

South Korea, a country of 50 million people, has set an example of successfully flattening the curve of new COVID-19 infections by conducting over 400,000 tests [13] (Figure 2). This was achieved by setting up drive-through testing, allowing at least 10,000 people to be tested per day. South Korea's foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha, in an interview with BBC News [2], said that "Testing is central because that leads to early detection, minimizes further spread, and quickly treats those found with the virus". Several countries are suffering from severe community spread because of their delays in testing [12], two of the prime examples being the United States and Italy. In the United States, among a population of 330 million, the number of confirmed cases is more than 230,000 with over 10,000 deaths and these numbers are growing exponentially (Figure 3), whereas in South Korea there are around 9976 confirmed cases and 169 deaths (as of April 2, 2020). Thus, early testing and repeated testing at regular intervals are two of the key strategies to ensure a low fatality rate. However, for countries with a large population (more than 100 million), it is difficult to adopt exhaustive testing schemes because of the limited number of available testing-kits and facilities. Testing a lot of people with mild or no symptoms would occupy the limited testing resources, which could otherwise be used for highrisk patients. However, it is also important to test individuals with mild or no symptoms to detect asymptomatic cases [10] and implement a method that systematically tests individuals for COVID-19.

Life insurer Pru Life UK has officially released its mobile app "Pulse" which uses the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) for health management and is available to all users -- policy holders or not. The Pulse app will take advantage of Pru Life UK's large library of AI-backed and real-time updated symptom checker and will have a paid option for online consultation. "Through AI-powered features such as a symptom checker that acts as a digital-first gateway for users when seeking care and a health assessment tool that gives users insight into their long-term disease risks, Pulse enables its users to get a better picture of their health," said Pru Life UK president and CEO Antonio De Rosas. To make the app more responsive, De Rosas said the company plans to link it with wearable devices in future rollout of updates. The app's Symptom Checker and Healthcheck tools are enabled through technology-based health service provider Babylon, known for subscription remote consultations with healthcare professionals through video or text.

Hamish Fraser first encountered Babylon Health in 2017 when he and a colleague helped test the accuracy of several artificial intelligence-powered symptom checkers, meant to offer medical advice for anyone with a smartphone, for Wired U.K. Among the competitors, Babylon's symptom checker performed worst in identifying common illnesses, including asthma and shingles. Fraser, then a health informatics expert at the University of Leeds in England, figured that the company would need to vastly improve to stick around. "At that point I had no prejudice or knowledge of any of them, so I had no axe to grind, and I thought'Oh that's not really good,'" says Fraser, now at Brown University. "I thought they would disappear, right? Much has changed since the Wired U.K. article came out. Since early 2018, the London-based Babylon Health has grown from just 300 employees to approximately 1,500. The company has a valuation of more than $2 billion and says it wants to "put an affordable and accessible health service in the hands of every person on earth." In England, Babylon operates the fifth-largest practice under the country's mostly government-funded National Health Service, allowing patients near London and Birmingham to video chat with doctors or be seen in a clinic if necessary. The company claims to have processed 700,000 digital consultations between patients and physicians, with plans to offer services in other U.K. cities in the future. "I thought they would disappear, right?

We present a visual symptom checker that combines a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent as a Question Answering (QA) model. This method enables us to not only increase the classification confidence and accuracy of the visual symptom checker, but also decreases the average number of relevant questions asked to narrow down the differential diagnosis. By combining the CNN output in the form of classification probabilities as a part of the state structure of the simulated patient's environment, a DQN-based RL agent learns to ask the best symptom that maximizes its expected return over symptoms. We demonstrate that our RL approach increases the accuracy more than 20% as compared to the CNN alone, and up to 10% as compared to the decision tree model. We finally show that the RL approach not only outperforms the performance of the decision tree approach but also narrows down the diagonosis faster in terms of the average number of asked questions.

Online symptom checkers have been deployed by sites such as WebMD and Mayo Clinic to identify possible causes and treatments for diseases based on a patient’s symptoms. Symptom checking first assesses a patient by asking a series of questions about their symptoms, then attempts to predict potential diseases. The two design goals of a symptom checker are to achieve high accuracy and intuitive interactions. In this paper we present our context-aware hierarchical reinforcement learning scheme, which significantly improves accuracy of symptom checking over traditional systems while also making a limited number of inquiries.

Infermedica, a Poland and US-based company, has released a white-labeled symptom checker and triage platform after successful pilots with European healthcare insurance companies Allianz Partners, Dovera, and PZU. Infermedica uses artificial intelligence technology which has the potential to significantly improve quality of care, both from a provider and patient perspective. The application advises patients on what to do next when they feel unwell. After asking a series of diagnostic questions, Infermedica's AI suggests possible conditions and suitable actions to take. Infermedica estimates that typically up to 26% of patient cases are self-treatable, and a symptom checker can be used to prevent unnecessary visits by instead providing self-care or teleconsultations.

Today, we're pleased to announce the private preview of a new AI-powered project from Microsoft's Healthcare NExT initiative which is designed to enable our healthcare partners to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots. These bots are powered by cognitive services and enriched with authoritative medical content, allowing our partners to empower their customers with self-service access to health information, with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing costs. So, if you're using a health bot built by one of our partners as part of our project, you can interact in a personal way, typing or talking in natural language and receiving information to help answer your health-related questions. Our partners, including Aurora Health Care, with 15 hospitals, over 150 clinics and 70 pharmacies throughout eastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, Premera Blue Cross, the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest, and UPMC, one of the largest integrated health care delivery networks in the United States, are working with us to build out bots that address a wide range of healthcare-specific questions and use cases. For instance, insurers can build bots that give their customers an easy way to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services.

The symptom checker was developed and validated by over 200 clinicians and we believe it to be one of the safest and most accurate symptom checkers of its kind globally. Our pre-launch research found it to be 17% more accurate than the senior, experienced emergency nurses and 13% more accurate than the juniors doctors we tested the symptom checker against. We fully acknowledge the role for human interaction in care delivery and feel the use of AI helps to significantly augment the human touch through freeing up precious time and resources to do so.

A high British entrepreneur thinks he is solved the issue of our over-stretched NHS – a private robotic physician you'll be able to entry with the press of a button. Babylon is being hailed because the world's first synthetic intelligence triage nurse and may be accessed on a smartphone at any time. On the app's launch in London yesterday, Ali stated his machine outperforms the well being service and is a "phenomenal step" in the way forward for each the NHS and world healthcare. "Within the final three weeks, 20,000 folks used our symptom checker and in the identical time interval 600,000 folks used the 111 helpline – that is three% of individuals already," he mentioned at Babylon's HQ in West London. In response to Babylon's calculations, in 102 medical eventualities the well being app outperforms medical doctors by 21.5% and nurses by 23.5%.