There’s so many bioinformatics and sensors available now – We can measure and record – but making sense of all this data by itself yields only instrumental information. It’s important to place medical data into the context of the person themselves and the family and social situation they are in. This contextualization is what will bring us helpful and cost effective health care.

Effect of the Pandemic

The pandemic has highlighted differences in access to medical services. In turn, there has been a general collapse in hospitals and health centers in all countries of the world. This has meant that, on many occasions, the aid has not arrived in a timely manner.

Purely Medical Approaches are Insufficient

In turn, during the pandemic we have focused on purely medical aspects, leaving aside aspects such as isolation, loneliness, depressive processes, etc. in the background. This has meant that cases that are currently being relied upon, for example, in chronic depressions from isolation, need medical attention that includes medication, when adequate prevention would have significantly reduced these difficulties, as well as saved significant amounts of money to health systems in all countries. It should be noted that emotional health continues to be one of the aspects undervalued or with less attention. Usually, attention is paid to the disease once it is quite serious, but the resources available to promote correct emotional health are really scarce, despite its benefits.

All Healthcare Practice is Important not just COVID

We must remember that while the fight against COVID remains a priority, the chronically ill or those suffering severe diseases such as cancer, continue and will continue to exist. The ratio of these types of cases, at the moment, does not seem to be decreasing. However, everyone knows the cases where cancer patients have not been able to administer the necessary medication due to the collapse of health systems. In a significant proportion of cases, there has not been time to administer the necessary medication, or the diagnostic tests have been delayed so much that once obtained it was too late to provide a satisfactory solution and cure these people. Another issue that affects the effectiveness of clinical treatments is adherence to treatment. Within this, we find a diversity of factors, including perceived professional, family and social support, level of education, etc. (Cabascango, Tapia, & Linto, 2017;

Social Factors in Chronic Disease must be Considered

In the case of Chronic Kidney Disease, emotional alteration is one of the main factors that influence the deterioration of the patient, since it requires the individual processes of social, family and work adaptation, in which the expression of negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger is observed (Vinaccia & Orozco, 2005). In the case of CKD patients, the living condition is violated with respect to family, social, occupational or work interaction, further affecting the household economy, health status and social interaction. (Tovbin, Gidron, Jean, Granovsky & Schnieder, 2003) For example, Díaz-Soto, Présiga-Ríos & Zapata-Rueda (2017) in a study on Chronic Kidney Disease conclude that those patients with greater perceived social support present a greater adherence to treatment, and, therefore, a greater benefit in their health status. Martín Alfonso, Grau Ábalo & Espinosa Brito, (2014) for their part, also state that greater support, both family and professional, contributes positively to adherence to pharmacological treatment of chronically ill patients. In this particular study, 43% of the individuals with good adherence were married.

Social Support Creates Health

As we can see, there is empirical evidence that perceived support favors adherence to pharmacological treatments in people with chronic and / or serious illnesses, however, not all people have such support. There are various factors that affect this lack of perceived support, mainly found in the lack of resources to carry out adequate follow-up by health system professionals, and, on the other hand, those people who live alone or who do not count with people close to you who can provide such support for a variety of reasons. And what happens to the relatives of the chronically ill, the terminally ill, etc.? Who supports those who should give support? The most common example is the evidence of burnout in caregivers ……… So, we return to the previous cases, our health systems and our social systems do not have the resources available to provide that much-needed support.

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Social Interventions are Critical to Good Health Care In summary, the well-being of individuals, in addition to depending on purely clinical aspects, depends on the social factor, however, exacerbated even more by the fight against COVID, health systems do not have resources and tools that achieve a comprehensive and adequate intervention. This lack of resources leads us, as we have seen, to difficulties in adherence to pharmaceutical therapy processes, but also to not paying attention to social and emotional well-being, which is so important for the prevention of diseases such as depression.

Please describe your solution. Describe it as precisely as possible.

SIA – the Social Intelligent Assistant.

The proposed solution is the use of an individualized and personalized AI Assistant, which takes into account, in addition to the purely clinical aspects, those other aspects such as social integration that favor physical well-being. Health should not be understood in a restrictive way to the clinical context, but it should be comprehensive. It is known that the social brain favors physical well-being, learning, and benefits medical therapies. Therefore, the proposed tool adds the SIA application through a wearable voice activated device that interacts with each individual through different stimuli. This is fundamental, since each individual will have specific needs, and it is important that those individuals with impairment of any of the senses have adapted resources. Thus, this chabot located on a mobile device and enabled through wearable sensors will interact with each individual through light signals, through voice and through text, using one or more of them depending on the specific case. Additionally the sensors will monitor vitals such as heart rate and steps. And share these in real time with the social circle. Doctors, Family Members, Social Workers, Personal Carers, extended Family. All the information obtained through this application must be linked privately with the reference health worker, but also with the reference social worker; since, as we indicated, health is not exclusively a clinical question. Family and friends can be linked as permissioned by the patient. We will build a demo or POC for the purpose of this hackathon in order to illustrate the concepts in a working model.

Please describe the impact of your solution. What is the solution’s potential?

One of the issues that SIA seeks to improve are the health difficulties derived from the isolation situation. As we mentioned, social isolation leads individuals to chronic depressions, with a difficult solution, especially when we speak of older people who reside in rural areas; Well, as human beings, we are social beings. Thus, by using SIA in people in a situation of social isolation, we will be reducing the clinical situations of depression and chronic depression, with the consequent benefit for the individuals themselves, for the communities in which these individuals reside, as they will be able to benefit from the community work, and for the health services themselves, whose economic now would be greatly increased. Although we have started talking about the benefits of reducing social isolation, it should be noted that joint follow-up between doctors and social workers in cases of serious and / or chronic illnesses is relevant, since it favors perceived social support, and thus adherence to clinical therapies. Thus, the main impact of SIA is in the prevention of diseases such as depression, and in the improvement of serious and / or chronic diseases, with the consequent savings for health systems. At the same time, it avoids the overload of the health services without losing control of the cases already started, systematizing the records through a platform connected to the individual robot of each of the patients.

Intervention at Scale

SIA provides an opportunity to create a vast social network to connect people looking for support and meet new people outside of their existing social context. By offering anonymous and permissioned connections to new people that are monitored by social care workers – vibrant relationships can develop. Rather than a social network designed to monetize and exploit the data collected we will provide the care of doctors and trained health professionals to nurture and support interactions. The network will be paid for by the purchase of the monitoring devices and carry with it the greatest yield for this informational use in terms of health.

Security, Social Norm, and Relief from Corporate and Unlawful Surveillance and Data Use

It’s important to note that we are aware current social networks are rife with social disease. Our network can be fostered appropriately for optimum patient interaction and negative behavior treated as symptoms of medical conditions. This is in direct opposition to current abuses of social network informations as an opportunity to exploit personal information or data financially. Private and public security encroachment will be limited only to the letter of the law under medical supervision- and only by court order. This limits the interpretation or use of social maladaptation as criminal as well as greatly reducing covert or disruptive activity on the health network. Unique permissions will be developed which support data privacy laws and personal medical data – and only granting access when medically necessary – to the exact limits of the law in the operating jurisdiction. As much as is feasible we will encrypt and maintain private data centers. Our aim is to localize patient records and only grant access when warranted. by medical necessity. This also denies color of law privacy violations intended to fight “terrorism” and “crime” in noble cause corruption efforts or enforcement overreach.

Network Abuses

As we gain traction and scale additional safeguards and artificial intelligence can be employed to detect and respond to anomalous coordinated inauthentic behaviors. Because identity information and gatekeeping will be strictly addressed for the health of the participants, undesirable elements will be limited and expelled with prejudice. This includes doctors flying false flags in social engineering stings. or social profiles created in sock puppet masquerade. Trolls will be ejected as our terms of service will strictly forbid harrasment of any kind. These incidents will be final by vote of the medical staff and available for legal review with secure data provance, Our vision is to create an open free and safe space to create health in social groups. We will operate within already established AI ethical standards and maintain data freedom. We are seeking guidance from nurses, doctors, psychologists, and social workers to run our social network. This will also address addictive quality of current social network design. Our purpose is not to make clicks or gather security evidence but rather help people to be healthy. In our effort to protect the wellbeing of our people and this venture we will not “play ball” with anyone who hinders the mission.

Impact/ Business

The EU invests 9.8% of GDP into health. Over 30% is to primary care. Also half of spending on primary care is outpatient. If we reduce the average number of outpatient visits from 7 per capita. Applying SIA to public systems can mean savings of 0.5 of GDP. Regarding the number of private hospitals, we find a total of 10,571 hospitals throughout Europe, which are potential clients of SIA. By acting as a triage and responding to minor situations, the pressure on health systems is reduced, mainly emergencies and primary care.

Team

We are seasoned professionals, each in his own area. At the same time, we take into account the latest advances in innovation and research, taking into account that we cannot propose a market product that does not suppose an advance and a necessity; and that, in turn, presents a scientific endorsement.
Winners of EUvsVirus Hackthon. Skills in Social psychology innovation policy and bleeding edge tech. We have been invited into two business accelerators in the last month and we will follow up on those opportunities. We are seeking hospitals and outpatient facilities to test in.

Technical prototype

We focused on implementation of a skeleton architecture by population of our dialogs and user scenarios. We placed the demo on a live URL and public server. We now have working ALPHA conversation in both web and mobile. We still need to do live use with patients and doctors with sensor data and live communications hooks.