Screen using voice, monitor 100 patients remotely … The anti-Covid innovations of the future



Among the 100 innovations in the running for the 2021 edition of the Netexplo Grand Prix for Innovation, Team discover, a pair of 3D printed glasses, allows remote and simultaneous monitoring of the vital signs of around a hundred Covid patients. – Netexplo

  • This Wednesday is the Netexplo Innovation Forum, in partnership with UNESCO.
  • Among the 2,000 or so innovations captured by the Netexplo Observatory, 100 were selected, and only one will be awarded the Grand Prize for Innovation.
  • Among the candidates, 20 minutes introduces you to three projects that could revolutionize the screening and care of Covid patients.

Innovation in the service of health. This is nothing new. On the other hand, what has changed over the past year and the start of the coronavirus pandemic is that it has put itself at the service of the fight against Covid-19. Researchers around the world are hard at work, and the next generation is also working. Scientists or students, their ideas could revolutionize the future. This is the whole quest of the Global Innovation Observatory
Netexplo, which, in partnership with Unesco, has captured no less than 2,000 innovations across the globe, to select 100, as part of its Netexplo Innovation Forum.

20 minutes introduces you to three who, one day, could participate in screening for Covid-19 and improve patient follow-up. In 2020, it is Astroscale, a Japanese solution to clean up space, which won the favor of the public. For this 2021 edition, the Grand Prize awarded on Wednesday rewarded
the feminist community Smashboard.

3D printable glasses to monitor patients remotely

It looks like a sci-fi movie prop or some well-equipped gamer stuff. But “Team discover” could prove to be much more practical than that. Developed by a team of five Hungarian students who came first in the Health and Life category of the EUvsVirus hackathon, this 3D printed device looks like glasses and is worn … like glasses. The goal: to allow Covid patients to have their vital signs – temperature, oxygen saturation or respiratory frequencies – monitored remotely:

The data collected is transmitted in real time to a monitoring platform, allowing caregivers to keep an eye on a large number of patients at the same time. “We give nurses superpowers, allowing them to monitor 100 patients in the time normally needed to check just one. While being at a distance from the risk ”, welcomes the Hungarian team, whose prototype costs only 21 euros.

A voice analyzer capable of detecting Covid-19

It is one of the temples of world scientific research. At MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the prestigious American institute, scientists have developed a new model of artificial intelligence. Called “Cough-scrutinizing” [qui scrute la toux], the tool is able to detect Covid-19 by sound! Forgotten the deep and unpleasant introduction of the swab into the nostrils, here the screening for Covid-19 is done from a simple forced cough.

To accomplish this feat, the researchers fed their artificial intelligence well, making it ingest the sounds of tens of thousands of recordings of coughs and words spoken by carriers of the virus. And the results are more than promising: the machine has an accuracy of 98.5%. More surprisingly, the effectiveness is also at the rendezvous on the analysis of sound samples from asymptomatic patients. A “predictive diagnostic tool”, argues the Netexplo Observatory, which sees it as an innovative method of “non-invasive detection of infected people, asymptomatic or not, to try to stop chain and large-scale contamination as early as possible. “.

This tool, if it becomes more democratic, could in the future make it possible to test fragile people or very young children, in whom it is difficult or even impossible to perform nasopharyngeal screening by PCR. Or that could be used with populations located in areas poorly endowed with screening tests.

A multilingual robot to visit the sick

Lack of staff. Lack of masks, gowns or other protective equipment for caregivers. All this, France has experienced, in particular during the first wave of the epidemic, where caregivers were massively contaminated by the coronavirus. But it is not the only one, and many countries have done and still face such difficulties. To try to remedy this, students from the Polytechnic of Dakar, in Côte d’Ivoire, created “Doctor Car”, a medical robot equipped with anti-Covid innovations.

Their invention, which resembles a small cart, has several advantages in its pocket. Polyglot, the little robot currently speaks English, French, but also Pulaar and Wolof, two languages ​​spoken in Senegal, Mali and other countries in West Africa. Remote-controlled by an app, it travels through isolation rooms to deliver medication and meals to patients, thus reducing contact between caregivers and contagious patients. An innovation that could in the future be used in areas lacking equipment or caregivers, during epidemic episodes.





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