India's second wave of COVID19 was devastating - there were countless lives lost, thousands gravely ill and scrambling for access to basic healthcare resources like beds, medicines and oxygen supply. Even as the daily case load is significantly reduced and hospitals easing up on patient intake, valuable lessons were learnt in the summer of 2021. As attested even by eminent doctors like cardio surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty, there are a finite number of resources and medical staff that can help the sick. While keeping ourselves safe from contracting COVID19 is contingent on every single one of us, it definitely helps to stay prepared. 

The sudden surge in cases and virulence of the Delta strain placed an immense amount of pressure on the national healthcare system. Aghast at the plight of the common man, and in some cases, moved by tales of their own personal losses and tragedy, several members of the tech community banded together and develop solutions to help the nation combat COVID19 a bit more effectively. Multiple collectives of people, from all walks of life - united by the power of social media - began pooling in their resources and information on precious resources that could save a life. But these Good Samaritan acts were inviting a far more complex problems - aggregation of huge amounts of data, verification of this data, ensuring demand and supply was actually synced. And these needed to be fixed immediately. 

This is where engineers, coders, developers and entrepreneurs showed their true potential of community engagement and technology skills. Earlier, we had written about Introbot, which was started by Divyaansh Anuj and Utkarsh Roy and became a part of a national volunteer drive called CovidCitizens.Org. This bot has access to more than 30,000 verified leads of essential COVID19 resources and can dispense this information in seconds on WhatsApp. AI technologies played a crucial role in mobilising vast amounts of data, verifying information and dispensing this information to the right person through a bot. The bot started gaining popularity with not only citizens in distress but even suppliers and vendors. This led the duo to introduce a unique load balancing algorithm that could manage supply and demand with realtime data. While the bot's use in India is limited for the time being, Anuj and Roy realised they were on the brink of something revolutionary - AI-driven community engagement during a national crisis. The duo stated that the collective entrepreneurial experience they bring, in addition to the vast knowledge that other members of this volunteer initiative brought, was a gold mine to build a vast community engagement system that was driven by data and AI. Given the nature of COVID's proliferation, the affected geographies could change but the need for help and timely access to resources would not. Now, Indonesia is being hailed as the Asian epicentre of the COVID19 outbreak. Earlier this week, Divyaansh posted a message on his LinkedIn page seeking access to people in Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia (which too is witnessing a surge in cases) who can help with onground volunteer efforts. Roy said, "There are so many groups today - professional, personal, alumni networks, hobby groups.. these communities are already created. What we want to do is develop a layer of intelligence that can add more value to what these groups can offer its members and anyone else who wants to join. AI can process streams of information about groups, form connections, build insights and add immense value to the existing human relationships."

Similar motivations led to the creation of Mission Humane. Bangalore-based retail analytics startup DaveAI teamed up with some Nasscom Deeptech club startups to create a single point of information that could help COVID19 patients and caretakers with the right information and resources. "We are in the midst a national health crisis and the need of the hour is to contribute whichever way one can. In the first week of the second wave, the magnitude of the crisis was beyond us. It took us that week to realize that even though we are a small team with limited resources, that should not stop us from doing what we can. And we would like to talk about our effort to the world with only one motive - this may motivate other small teams to organize themselves & do what they can. We would also be glad to work with other like-minded teams or individual volunteers and ensure we can impact more lives," said Sriram, CEO & Co-founder, DaveAI. Startups working on Mission Humane are LeewayHertz, Gaia, dotKonnect, Numpy Ninja and B2R. Around 50 volunteer engineers and 450 other volunteers were part of Mission Humane, and helped solve individual use cases. CTO Ananthakrishnan added that they have reached nearly 500,000 people through different platforms including the website, Twitter, Telegram and Facebook, with 95% from India. Core AI technologies at play were NLP to gather and analyse large amounts of data, Computer Vision and OCR to process requests in an image format, and brought together through a bot that was designed to detect languages accurately and convey responses accordingly. In addition, a sizeable amount of engineering was involved, mainly parsing websites and scraping for freshly updated data. You can access the bot for updates by texting this number on WhatsApp +919321238607 or by visiting this page.

While their idea took shape during the second wave, Mission Humane is hopeful of being more prepared and armed with the right resources to help people, should there be a third wave. While this is a purely volunteer-driven initiative, there is scope for materialising the use of AI for specific use cases in the future, specifically, data gathering and data scraping to be deployed during a mass crisis. One of the members is Supratim Dasgupta, who is the cofounder of Numpy Ninja, also runs an initiative called Eradicate Diabetes where he and a team of data scientists developed AI/ML models of dietary interventions to reverse Type 2 diabetes. After seeing this initiative thrive, Dasgupta understands that doctors often approach disease management differently, including COVID19. Along with some volunteers, he's working on a CT Analyser, which can harness ML models to develop an international standard CT severity score to provide an initial assessment to patients seeking clarity from CT scans. Other ideas that Mission Humane is pursuing includes pattern analysis algorithms based on cough sounds, and anomaly detection using COVID19 datasets to figure out under-reporting or the nature of an impending third wave. 

Recently, the WHO released a report propagating the use of AI and six guiding principles in healthcare in light of the COVID19 pandemic. One of the core tenets that the WHO endorses is the use of AI to support diverse public health interventions, such as disease surveillance, outbreak response, and health systems management. AI could also empower patients to take greater control of their own health care and better understand their evolving needs. It could also enable resource-poor countries and rural communities, where patients often have restricted access to health-care workers or medical professionals, to bridge gaps in access to health services.

Citizen-centric initiatives like Mission Humane and CovidCitizens.Org can help bridge the last mile, which is often where the quantum of healthcare delivery fails in India. With the aid of AI technologies, there is scope for every human to receive timely help, aid and assistance in a health crisis like COVID19.