Will blockchain and AI save the day in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? The tech industry is looking at new and innovative ways to combat the virus and AI-based management systems and blockchain technologies may have an important role to play.
Several tech startups are focusing their efforts on using AI and blockchain in the charity sector to manage large and complex datasets associated with the COVID-19 virus and infection rates. AI is especially useful for quickly analyzing data to make expert judgments and predict outcomes. And AI and blockchain may be used together in the charity sector to make the donation process more transparent as well as increase decision-making visibility.
Hyperchain, a Chinese startup, launched its Shanzong blockchain-based donation tracking platform to combat donation scandals as the country battled the coronavirus. The platform accrued more than $2 million in donations in just days, as the company guaranteed the authenticity of donation information. This was accomplished by putting all the data on blockchain, preventing it from being changed or deleted.
Atlanta startup Acoer is also using blockchain to help combat the coronavirus pandemic. The company, which specializes in building secure and transparent blockchain-enabled applications, announced its HashLog data visualization engine. The solution is designed to help customers in the healthcare and life sciences sector easily track and visualize the COVID-19 outbreak using the HashLog data visualization engine.
The offering is designed to interact in real time with Hedera's Hashgraph enterprise-grade distributed public ledger. The HashLog dashboard gives scientists, researchers and journalists access to information on the spread of the virus and records trends. It pulls data from the CDC and WHO to report on the number of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries per hundred infections and trends over time.
"There is a growing supply of data about the virus, but the information is not necessarily easy to visualize, consume or extract in a simple way," said Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer. "With HashLog our objective is to make data collection automated, and data visualization rich, dynamic, and intuitive."
Texas startup Hedera offers a decentralized public network for a variety of usage cases and interactions. Developers can easily build secure, fast decentralized apps on top of the platform. The network is powered by hashgraph consensus to offer high-grade security and fast transaction speeds with low bandwidth consumption.
"Healthcare and public health is a key area where Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can provide computational trust, and serve as a source of truth for multiple parties to work from, delivering consistent, factual information across distributed communities," said Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph. "Acoer's work to make this coronavirus data so easy to visualize and understand is a great example of this, and we commend them for this innovative use of DLT for the public good."
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
