Ori Shaashua, co-founder and VP of product at Neura, writes why the company’s AI-based solutions can help defeat COVID-19.
Complete closures save lives, it’s an indisputable fact. Yet those full closures, in reaction to a wave of infections, are destroying livelihoods as businesses are shuttered and mental trauma is inflicted. The question then becomes, how can governments protect as many human lives as possible, while also restarting the economy? The answer is unexpected, to say the least, it’s not an improvement in medtech or even tech directly related to medicine, it’s behavioural intelligence that is typically used to connect brands to their customers’ specific preferences, optimise traffic and mobility services, city planning and population health metrics.
So, what does behavioural intelligence have to do with COVID-19?
That large scale anonymised human behaviour data can show trends regarding how the population moves and gauge the rate of contacts occurring in an area, or even measure how close they are to others. Those abilities, besides being great for connecting businesses to their customers, happen to be crucial to shifting from reactive lockdowns to proactive, differential policymaking and business decisions that aid in breaking the chain of infection. Most governments and health systems simply drive decisions based on the percent of positive tests, but by the time individuals are tested and the result marked they have already infected others who often don’t know they’re infected and the COVID-19 continues to spread until another lockdown.
Breaking the chain of infection
24-48 hours. That’s all the time there is to recognise a transmission trend and break it up before it turns into a localised pandemic. With real-time macro-level trends based on factors such as transmission and contact, policymakers can deploy resources in a targeted manner so they aren’t overstretched and have the maximum impact. A few positive cases in one area are linked to movements throughout the day, or particular events and selective lockdown, or tighter distancing measures can be put in place exactly where they are needed before it’s too late, while keeping other areas open. Effective tactics can even be deployed based on the behavioural data alone since specific behavioural factors are strongly correlated to positive cases.
Testing tardiness makes us play COVID-19 catchup
Even the fastest test in most cases is not quick enough to take a proactive policy. Traditional testing methods take days and are very expensive and alternatives such as the new, affordable 15-minute antigen tests don’t solve the problem. The new tests have far less sensitivity, rendering them unable to detect a positive until it’s too late to take preemptive measures. Here too, behavioural intelligence comes to the rescue.
With an understanding of how social a neighborhood has been, where they have travelled, how much distance they’ve kept etc. a risk factor can be assigned. The ability to accurately identify high and low-risk individuals getting tested enables labs to group low-risk individuals together to conduct sample pooling.
That tactic, which recently gained emergency approval from the FDA, allows large pools of tests that are low risk to be tested all at once without the need to “open up” the pool unless a positive is found. ViruScore, the solution our team developed was able to achieve 98% accuracy (i.e. no positive found amongst 98% of tests pooled) speeding up traditional testing by six times.
Any good strategy must take the economy into account
People’s livelihoods and businesses’ survival depend on a policy that balances safeguarding lives and safeguarding livelihoods. Businesses, however, are not completely defenceless. Behavioural intelligence, aside from allowing them to connect to customers, offers a clear indicator of when foot traffic will come back to a neighbourhood and how risky that foot traffic is. Those two elements are essential when it comes to determining when and how to reopen to maximise benefit and avoid greater losses.
This pandemic has brought devastation to be sure, but even amidst the greatest challenges, there are methods to mitigate disaster, cultivate hope, and plot a better way forward. Transcending the traditional confines of medicine and medtech to find solutions such as those driven by behavioural intelligence is one of those methods. Now, it’s up to us to implement these digital solutions to make an immediate impact and keep them ready for the future.
