One app tells you if you have been in the vicinity of a COVID-19 carrier and another aims to assess whether you have the novel coronavirus based on the sound of your voice.
In Israel, sometimes dubbed the “start-up nation,” with nearly 10 percent of workers employed in high-tech, the coronavirus pandemic has seen a flurry of new technologies designed to contain transmission.
Start-Up Nation Central, a non-governmental organization, has compiled a directory of about 70 Israeli technology companies developing responses to the new virus, which has infected more than 4,000 people in the country.
Photo: AFP
One app that has stood out so far is Hamagen, Hebrew for “the shield,” launched earlier this month by the Ministry of Health.
Using geolocation technology, the app informs users about any points of contact with known COVID-19 cases.
Available in five languages, Hamagen has been downloaded by more than 1 million users.
The fortunate ones receive messages saying “no points of intersection have been found with coronavirus patients.”
“We’ll let you know if there is anything new,” it adds.
Hamagen was launched amid a controversy over plans to involve Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency in the fight against the virus.
Critics warned that allowing a powerful investigative body access to personal devices without a court order could mark an irrevocable setback in the effort to safeguard data protection.
Israel’s highest court ruled that any Shin Bet involvement required parliamentary oversight.
Hamagen requires user consent and the ministry has assured that “GPS data does not leave your mobile phone, and is not sent to any third party.”
The Ministry of Defense has meanwhile offered support to an Israeli start-up called Vocalis Health, which is developing an app capable of diagnosing COVID-19 based on the sound of someone’s voice.
“We are working around the clock,” cofounder Tal Wenderow said.
Voice samples from virus carriers in various stages of illness and samples from non-infected people are currently being collected, with the goal of developing an artificial intelligence-based algorithm to detect COVID-19’s vocal “fingerprint.”
Health professionals will then be able to alert users in the early stages of the disease and use the app to monitor its spread across the population.
The response from people willing to give voice samples has been “overwhelming,” Wenderow said.
In addition to helping curb new infections, the app could allow patients to be monitored at home, he said.
Israel’s largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, has already been using nascent technologies to protect staff caring for coronavirus patients.
“The guiding principle is to make sure there is as little contact as necessary between medical teams and patients,” said professor Eyal Leshem, director of Sheba’s center for travel medicine and tropical diseases.
To that end, Sheba monitors patients in mild condition through “telemedicine,” which allows vital signs to be communicated to staff via sensors connected to a patient’s phone “without any need for direct contact,” Leshem said.
“We used this in our in-patient treatment — now when we’re shifting from containment to mitigation, we’re going to start using the same technologies to monitor patients at home,” Leshem said.
Sheba also has an innovation and research center, which is working to collect “all meta-data from COVID-19 patients.”
“As we have more and more data accumulated, we’ll be able to identify markers of severe disease, identify prognostic factors for hospitalized patients at all levels, and potentially use this data to identify treatment opportunities,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver