Social distancing, surveillance and rapid-response efforts help spread of COVID-19 worldwide. But gathering patient information and tracking is a massive challenge for authorities across the globe. In its battle against the pandemic outbreak, China used digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. AI helped China to watch patients, track virus, and divide resource and ensure social distancing. Here in India, state and local governments are also leveraging AI technologies in their fight against the pandemic.

Construction and engineering company Larsen and Toubro (L&T) is helping 20 cities including Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Prayagraj, Ahmedabad, Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad with its smart technology solutions for civic management. These technologies are helping respective city administrations in their current responsibilities of tracking patients, containing spread, monitoring quarantined people, controlling crowding by police personnel, galvanise rescue efforts by the administration, spreading COVID19 related messages to the populace and establishing the rule of law in the current pandemic scenario.

The company has partnered with municipal and police agencies of various cities to set up technology and manage command and control centres and city operations centres across India. “L&T Smart World & Communication has been working with various city administrations and state governments to manage complex civic functions in metropolitan cities,” says SN Subrahmanyan, CEO & MD, Larsen &Toubro. ”With its ability to integrate various smart technologies to manage surveillance, crowd management, message delivery & communication to the residing populace, L&T is supporting the transformation of city civic administrations,” he added.

AI to track vehicles 

The company has employed AI technologies for its civic management programmes. For instance, in Hyderabad, the administration issued an order asking people not to drive beyond three kilometres from their residences even for buying essential goods. L&T has devised an innovative way to help the police enforce the restriction. 

“Using the existing machine learning-based automated number plate recognition (ANPR) system vehicle locations are monitored. The moment a vehicle crosses the 3-km limit; an automated alert is being sent out to the police. Additionally, through the integration of regional transport authority’s (RTA) database vehicle owners are identified aiding officials to issue warnings,” says Subhramanyan.

Another AI tool is used to control crowds. More than 200 cameras are deployed in critical areas across the city. These cameras are enabled with deep learning-based crowd formation analytics triggering real-time alerts at the police command centre. “Hyderabad police have so far received more than 1000 alerts, and officials were successful in dispersing the crowd through field officers,” states Subhramanyan.

AI for crowd monitoring and health tracking 

M-governance app that has been developed for Vizag Smart City is used by municipal officials in Vishakapattanam for their day to day operations. The app has now been customised for health workers to carry out house surveys for every three hours and record health parameters of self-isolated people and neighbourhood of COVID-19 positive cases. About 40,000 people in Greater Visakhapatnam use the citizen app, which is equipped with COVID-19 SOS button for citizens to notify of medical emergencies. A function to self-record health parameters of isolated people is incorporated in the app. The app also updates the information daily on international travellers and offers voluntary updating for self-isolated citizens.

In the North, Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj city has installed L&T’s smart city solutions to manage city operations and Kumbh Mela. This is now used to watch crowd formation through 1000+ CCTV cameras, that are AI-enabled, deployed throughout the city. L&T has also partnered with Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) to put in place advanced metering infrastructure in Uttar Pradesh including 4 million intelligent smart meters. As part of this project, a Consumer Mobile App was rolled out, which is currently used by 1 million people. This app is now leveraged to relay official COVID-19 related information from the authorities.

Apart from the above-stated initiatives, L&T is also working on implementing new AI-based solutions in cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad. As chatbot based emergency pass system and drone-based surveillance to check crowd formation and fever detection using thermal cameras will be soon installed.