What happens when millions of people gather for a worldwide event in a country where they may not speak the language but suddenly need medical attention?

For starters, you try to find ways to connect people across languages, including translating sometimes vague and culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terminology that doctors can understand for easy diagnosis. the condition of a patient and can decide the level of urgency. Then there is the issue of figuring out the formulation for prescriptions made in a country and how that translates into drugs available in the country of prescription. Also you need to put in place a monitoring or tracking system that can flag potential outbreaks before they spread to the activity.

Those are the challenges facing the organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, who know they will have to deal with the health issues faced by more than 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and for -athletes from over 150 countries and regions who speak 25 different languages. To help them solve this, the organizers turned to a company based in Silicon Valley, Humetrixwhich has created an award-winning Global Health Communicator based on the medical information databases it has gathered over the past 15 years.

Led by Dr. Bettina Experton, Humetrix develops data and analytic systems related to health, including a population-based health analysis system that allows the government to track and predict coronavirus outbreaks among 20 million Medicare recipients and enabled the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to identify areas in the US to send vaccines and other support during the 2020 pandemic.

For the Olympics, Experton and his team created a mobile app, powered in part by a generative AI chatbot, that international visitors can use to start the process of getting medical care from the stations of first aid set up in 200 competitions in Paris and from The 20,000 doctors and hospitals contracted to help the games provide care, said Experton. Patients scan a QR code, gain access to a secure mobile app, enter their medical information in their own language, select their medications from their home country and then allow the system to translate for them.

To help patients, doctors have access to a database of 4 million worldwide drugs and vaccines and information on 67,000 medical conditions that can be triggered by more than 4,000 symptoms. Again, all information is translated into 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, German, Korean, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.

All this must be done while ensuring that patients’ medical information remains confidential and secure, which means no remote storage of personal health information in the cloud or sharing of personally identifiable information with other systems. – monitor.

“Saved us time, increased test efficiency,” said a paramedic leading the Paris Summer Games. A Paris-based primary care doctor and volunteer at the first aid stations at the Paris Summer Games says, “I just love it – now I use it for my non-speaking patients French in our clinic.” Some hospitals have even extended this technology to all patients as part of their intake workflow, while some paramedics in the Paris region have added Humetrix QR code posters inside their ambulances.

on CES this week in Las Vegas, Humetrix plans to expand its global health platform by adding voice-to-voice capabilities that will allow patients to better communicate with medical and pharmaceutical providers at the push of a button. Using GPS location, Humetrix automatically translates and speaks symptoms, medications and other important health information into the local language, of which 25 languages ​​are available. In these situations, AI is combined with human and clinician intelligence (ie, fact-checked) to ensure that all translations make sense and use the correct expressions when voice-to-voice communication is used.

With its database of 4 million medical products worldwide, Humetrix technology can help you find something as simple as Tylenol in a different country that does not carry the exact drug but There is another name with the same active ingredient. But if a particular drug is not available in your current location, Humetrix will let you know.

Why is this sound technology not used in the Olympics? Because the Olympics take place in a public setting, vocalizing personal health information where others may hear may be a privacy concern. Even in a closed-door exam room in a hospital, voice-to-voice capabilities can streamline conversation and, as a result, diagnosis.

Remaining consistent, no personal information is stored in the cloud but locally on the user’s phone. The population-based health analysis system used by Humetrix was discontinued after the Paralympics but may be re-enabled depending on the use case.

This technology is available in B2B, and its design is suitable for use by the travel or healthcare industries, global organizers (such as those hosting international sports events) and governments. As Humetrix proved during the Summer Olympic Games, its technology can be successfully used to track symptoms and monitor the spread of the disease, which may prove to be more useful during another outbreak of disease in the world.

Health used to be a barrier to travel, preventing many from experiencing new cultures in the name of easy medical care. Even with technology like this bridging the gaps in international healthcare, these barriers to access in our global community may be disappearing. Information is power, especially when it comes to our health — and that shouldn’t be limited based on where you are in the world or what language you speak.