Technology at the service of healthcare. As? Applying the South Korea model in Italy. This is the end of"Innovate for Italy" initiative launched on March 23 by the Ministry of Innovation (together with Mise, Miur, Invitalia and with the support of the Extraordinary Commissioner, Domenico Arcuri) to try to monitor the contagion from the coronavirus. The aim is to limit the spread of the virus as much as possible by acting a priori, i.e. through prevention, and not a posteriori with hospital treatment.
THE EXAMPLE OF SOUTH KOREA
Until a few weeks ago, South Korea was the second country in the world by number of infected people after China. But unlike what is happening in the various European countries, Seoul managed in a short time to slow down and above all to make the infections regress. A result obtained by making a very high number of tampons, but also using technological innovation and big data to map all the movements of people affected by the coronavirus, identify who had been in contact with them and isolate people at risk. Surveillance cameras, GPS tracking and apps for smartphones and tablets were used to do this. No one is left out of this mass tracking, with strong privacy waivers (established by law).
THE INITIATIVE OF THE MINISTRY OF INNOVATION
THEanti-Covid 19 initiative launched by the Ministry of Innovation aims to identify:
“the best digital solutions available on the market for telemedicine apps and data analysis tools, and coordinate nationally the analysis, adoption, development and use of these solutions and technologies for monitoring and combating spread of Covid-19".
Source: Ministry of Innovation
The project is aimed not only at public and private research institutions, but also at universities, associations, cooperatives, consortia, foundations and institutes, startups, SMEs, large companies. You can join until 13 on 26 March.
The objective of the initiative, explains the ministry, is to identify technological solutions already implemented in the following areas:
1) telecare apps and technical solutions for home patients, both for pathologies related to COVID-19 and for other pathologies, even of a chronic nature. This area includes apps, websites and chatbots for the self-monitoring of health conditions, aimed at all citizens or only at some groups (such as subjects subjected to fiduciary isolation); 2) technologies and solutions for continuous tracking, alerting and control of the level of exposure to risk of people and consequently of the evolution of the epidemic in the area. This area includes data analysis systems, hardware and software technologies useful for the management of health emergencies.
Source: Minister of Innovation
Among the first companies to respond to the government's call is Vetrya, who presented the Pj19 project supported by the CNIT (National Interuniversity Consortium for Telecommunications), which consortium over 37 universities and 8 research units at the CNR.
“Our solution allows ttrack the spread and correlation on individuals of Covid-19 at a national level, using smartphone devices and a mapping system based on artificial intelligence, to derive correlations between individuals and provide the competent structures with the trend of the Covid-19, allowing for a detailed analysis on the database in real time and allowing the contaminants to be traced - declared Luca Tomassini, president and CEO of Vetrya during an exclusive interview with the broadcaster Sky TG24.
"The project - continued Tommasini - is independent of telecommunications operators and provides for an application to be installed on your smartphone and a correlation analysis platform".
Of course, all while respecting (as far as possible) the privacy of citizens. “It is essential that everyone data must be collected and stored in reliable and public hands and today these characteristics can only be represented by SOGEI, the company of the Ministry of Economy and Finance which represents a pole of technological excellence and which already holds the data of 60 million Italian citizens”, concluded Tomassini.
