Computing empowers medical services, disaster warning capabilities

CHANGSHA, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- When someone with an emotional issue or mental illness struggles with the idea of seeing a therapist in person, there is now another option: speaking to an artificial intelligence (AI) therapist through a WeChat mini program.

The AI therapist can answer questions about mental health, conduct mental health assessments and judge a person's emotional state by capturing facial expressions with the camera on the mobile phone. It was presented at the two-day 2024 World Computing Conference held this week in Changsha, the capital of central China's Hunan Province.

"The AI therapist will reply accordingly with its diagnosis and recommendations, speaking in an appropriate tone that should help comfort the person," said Yu Min, executive dean of the innovation research institute of Hunan Trasen Science & Technology Corp., Ltd., developer of the AI medical system.

People can also reach out to an AI doctor that can diagnose users after they describe their symptoms. It can also carry out traditional Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis and provide recipes and exercise recommendations to achieve improved balance and harmony within the body.

"Traditional models cannot meet the need to develop such systems in medical services, which require a high level of accuracy. However, fast-developing computing power has provided us with strong support to develop this medical system in a more accurate way," Yu said.

According to Pan Yunhe, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, new models are expected to help us become more knowledgeable and work toward preventive treatments for diseases in the coming years if data gathered from physical examinations, disease cases, families and regions is combined.

With extreme weather events increasing in frequency, computing power also has a huge role to play in the prevention and control of natural disasters.

Thanks to a disaster monitoring and early warning platform, six households in Dayingang Village, Hunan's Changde City, were able to relocate before a landslide occurred due to a week of rainfall in June.

The platform, developed by Hunan BDS Micro-chipset Data Technology Co., Ltd., is able to capture subtle changes in mountains by deploying high-precision monitoring equipment and sensors based on the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, said Long Pengyu, the company's deputy general manager.

"The platform can analyze the monitoring data to determine the mountain's status and predict natural disasters such as mudslides and landslides more than three hours in advance of their occurrence," he said.

The prevention of geological disasters such as landslides is an important task during the flood season in Hunan. Landslides develop quickly in extreme weather, and early warnings can now be sent via radio and text messages to help residents relocate in advance to avoid deaths, injuries and financial losses, Long added.

To date, the monitoring and early warning platform has been applied in more than 10 provinces in China.

"With accelerating technological innovation and algorithm improvement, we now have better warning results and accuracy levels. As a developer, we're also making efforts to reduce costs so that the platform can be used over a wider range and benefit more residents," he said.

The scale of China's computing industry reached 2.6 trillion yuan (about 370 billion U.S. dollars) in 2022, according to official statistics.