À̹ÌÁö È®´ë [Source: KT Corp.]
KT Corp. of South Korea backed by funding from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will turn out a self-diagnosis solution that can detect infectious disease infection and better respond to its spread using mobile phone data within this year.
This solution could be applied to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, according to KT on Monday.
KT signed a contract with the U.S. charity organization last month and began a process to develop a solution to respond to infectious disease more effectively.
The two agreed to develop such solution in a three-step program. KT and Gates Foundation will dole out 6 billion won ($4.83 million) each over the next three years in the form of a fund.
Target solutions under development include a self-diagnosis app for persons with flu-like symptoms, an artificial intelligence-based algorithm for early diagnosis of infectious disease, and a model to predict the spread of infectious disease.
When the self-diagnosis app becomes available potentially in October this year, users can input flu-like symptoms by themselves to know whether they have a common cold or influenza based on phone and demographic data.
KT also plans to distribute an IoT thermometer along with the app to improve accuracy in predictability.
The algorithm for early diagnosis of infectious disease and the disease spread route prediction model will also be developed within this year. When data is accumulated through the self-diagnostic app, the accuracy of the algorithm and predictive model will also increase, according to KT.
KT and Gates Foundation are studying whether to expand the target disease from flu to COVID-19 as their project designed prior to the COVID-19 outbreak has been focused on flu, one of the most common infectious diseases.
The ultimate goal of their project is to develop a model to predict how an infectious disease would spread domestically or overseas.
Once developed, the model could analyze the trend of infectious disease outbreaks in different regions and predict their potential spread by region.
KT is the only telco in the world that has joined forces with Gates Foundation to develop an early diagnosis and predictive model for infectious diseases.
During the 2015 MERS outbreak in Korea, KT proposed to the government to use the communication data of infected people for epidemiological investigations, and later cooperated with the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create the world`s first system to use roaming data of travelers from infected regions for quarantine.
Since then, it has joined the UN Global Compact (UNGC) `Lead Company`, a project that uses big data to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, and proposed the establishment of the Global Epidemic Prevention Platform (GEPP) at the World Economic Forum.
By Pulse
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