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 help?
For starters, you're trying to figure out a way to connect people across languages, including translating sometimes vague and culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terminology that doctors can understand to quickly assess a patient's condition and decide on the level of urgency. Then there is the issue of disclosure of prescription formulation created in one country and how this can be translated into drugs available in the prescribing country. You should also set up a tracking or monitoring system that can flag potential outbreaks before they spread to the event.
These were the challenges facing the organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, who knew they would have to address the health issues facing over 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and para-athletes from over 150 countries and regions who speak 25 different languages. To help them solve it, organizers turned to a Silicon Valley-based company, Humetrixwho created the award-winning Global Health Communicator based on the medical information databases he has been compiling for the past 15 years.
Led by Dr. Bettina Experton, Humetrix developed health-related data and analytics systems, including a population-based health analysis system that enabled the government to track and predict coronavirus outbreaks among 20 million Medicare recipients and enabled The Joint Department of Defense's Center for Artificial Intelligence will 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 a generative AI chatbot, that international visitors could use to begin the process of receiving medical care from first aid stations set up at 200 matches in Paris and of the 20,000 doctors and hospitals contracted to help the games provide care, Experton said. Patients scanned a QR code, accessed a secure mobile app, entered their medical information in their language, selected medications from their country, and then let the system translate for them.
To help those patients, doctors had access to a database of 4 million drugs and vaccines worldwide and information on 67,000 medical conditions that can be caused by over 4,000 symptoms. Again, all that information was 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 no remote storage of personal health information in the cloud or sharing of personally identifiable information with monitoring systems.
“It saves us time, it increases the efficiency of triage,” said one paramedic leading the Paris Summer Games. A primary care physician from Paris and a volunteer at the first aid stations at the Paris Summer Games said: “I just love it – I now use it for my non-French speaking patients in our clinic.” Some hospitals have even extended this technology to all patients as part of their admission workflow, while some paramedics in the Paris region have added Humetrix QR code posters to their ambulances.
On CES this week in Las Vegas, Humetrix plans to expand its global healthcare platform by adding voice-to-voice capabilities that will allow patients to better communicate with medical and pharmaceutical providers at the touch of a button. Using GPS location, Humetrix will automatically translate and speak symptoms, medications and other relevant health information in the local language, of which 25 languages are available. In these situations, AI is combined with human and clinician intelligence (ie, fact-checked) to ensure that all translations make sense and use the correct expressions when using voice-to-voice communication.
With its database of 4 million medical products worldwide, Humetrix's technology can help you find something as simple as Tylenol in another country that doesn't carry that exact drug, but has another with a different name with the same active ingredients. However, if a particular drug is not available at your current location, Humetrix will notify you.
Why wasn't this voice technology used in the Olympics? Since the Olympics are held in a public setting, vocalizing personal health information where others can hear would be a privacy concern. However, in a closed hospital exam room, voice-to-voice capabilities can guide the conversation and, as a result, the diagnosis.
Staying consistent, no personal information is stored in the cloud, but local to the user's phone. The population-based health analytics system used by Humetrix was paused after the Paralympics, but may be brought back up depending on the use case.
This technology is available B2B, and its design merits use by the tourism or healthcare industries, global organizers (such as those hosting international sporting events) and governments. As Humetrix proved during the Summer Olympics, its technology can be successfully used to monitor symptoms and track the spread of disease, which could prove especially useful during another global disease outbreak.
Health has previously been a barrier to travel, preventing many from experiencing new cultures in the name of affordable medical care. However, with technology like this bridging the gaps in international healthcare, these barriers to access for our global community may soon be gone. Information is power, especially when it comes to our health — and it shouldn't be limited based on where you are in the world or what language you speak.