Artificial Intelligence and Telehealth may Provide Early Warning of Epidemics

Janan Arslan; Kurt K Benke

doi:10.3389/frai.2021.556848

Artificial Intelligence and Telehealth may Provide Early Warning of Epidemics

Front Artif Intell. 2021 Jan 29:4:556848. doi: 10.3389/frai.2021.556848. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Janan Arslan^{1

2}, Kurt K Benke³

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Eye Research Australia, University of Melbourne, Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, East Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
² Department of Surgery, Ophthalmology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
³ School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a very sudden and serious impact on public health around the world, greatly adding to the burden of overloaded professionals and national medical systems. Recent medical research has demonstrated the value of using online systems to predict emerging spatial distributions of transmittable diseases. Concerned internet users often resort to online sources in an effort to explain their medical symptoms. This raises the prospect that incidence of COVID-19 may be tracked online by search queries and social media posts analyzed by advanced methods in data science, such as Artificial Intelligence. Online queries can provide early warning of an impending epidemic, which is valuable information needed to support planning timely interventions. Identification of the location of clusters geographically helps to support containment measures by providing information for decision-making and modeling.

Keywords: COVID-19; artificial intelligence; digital disease detection; epidemiology; pattern recognition; telehealth; virus.