When someone goes into cardiac arrest outside a hospital, time is critical: The chance of survival decreases about 10 percent with each minute. The first step–recognizing that it is cardiac arrest—is challenging for emergency dispatchers who have to make sense of symptoms relayed by a panicked friend or relative.
In Copenhagen, dispatchers now have help from AI. If you call emergency medical services (EMS), an artificially intelligent assistant called Corti will be on the line, using speech recognition software to transcribe the conversation and using machine learning to analyze the words and other clues in the background, such as breathing patterns, that point to a cardiac arrest diagnosis. The dispatcher gets alerts from the bot in real time.
An early small-scale study found that Corti can diagnose cardiac arrests with 95 percent accuracy. That’s compared to the average 73 percent accuracy of human dispatchers in Copenhagen.
Given an early and accurate diagnosis from a digital assistant, the dispatcher might be able to coach people nearby through CPR, or even send out medical drones with defibrillators to the location, which could arrive ahead of EMS.
Another study, which analyzed 170,000 calls, will soon be published. The startup will soon make an announcement about plans to expand in the United States.
SOURCE: Fast Company