As part of a collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), Tencent will be providing technology support to combat the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The COVID-19 self-triage assistant enables preliminary self-evaluation of possible infection of the disease. This open-source tool is now made available by Tencent on Github for developers around the world. Prior to this tool, Tencent has also provided an open-source COVID-19 live update module that to date has answered over six billion pandemic-related queries in China.
The announcement technological efforts and support by Tencent comes after a statement released on 3 April 2020 to deepen collaboration with the WHO. On top of the open-sourced digital health solutions, Tencent had donated US$10 million to WHO’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund to assist the global fight against the pandemic.
The fund was set up in March 2020 by the WHO to help all countries, particularly these who are vulnerable, at-risk, and with weak healthcare systems, to prepare and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
“I warmly thank Tencent for its generous contribution to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. I look forward to the collaboration with Tencent on promoting the use of digital health tools in the fight against COVID-19 and for a healthier, safer, fairer world,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
Tencent Health has built a COVID-19 self-triage assistant with AI technology for people of all nations to assist people carry out a self-check about any potential coronavirus infection, thus reducing the risk of cross infection caused by panic and seeking medical care inappropriately. This tool was designed to help the public fight the pandemic with knowledge and skills through translation of professional medical guidance into easy-to-understand messages. Since its launch, the tool has already helped 40 disease control and prevention centers, more than 300 hospitals, over 30 independent software vendor partners across 17 provinces in China and served tens of millions of people.
Tencent Health has used natural medical language processing technologies to construct a graph for respiratory disease diagnosis information. The tool seeks to help users with symptoms such as fevers and coughing to conduct a preliminary self-evaluation of their illnesses quickly and seek medical care appropriately. For global developers, open source code has made it much easier to adapt medical guidelines based on the versions released by local authorities, providing more valuable guidance for local people.
“The world is facing unprecedented challenges and needs to come together with great solidarity. WHO is leading and coordinating the global efforts, supporting countries to combat the pandemic. Tencent believes that global solidarity will help all of us fight the spread of COVID-19, and we will open source our digital health solutions in addition to making a donation to achieve this shared mission,” said Martin Lau, President of Tencent. [APBN]