Kefi: AI Initiative Supporting Youth Living with HIV
The AI technology is the product of a partnership between the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The tool is now available on WhatsApp with the aim of promoting a reliable and confidential space to offer everything from guidance on starting treatment to psychosocial support. Giovanni Cerri, professor at the USP Faculty of Medicine (FMUSP), assesses that the use of technology can help promote health for society.
Kefi’s activities
Kefi technology is established in a scenario of greater abandonment among young people of using condoms during sexual relations, in addition to a more technological society. In many cases, according to the professor, young people do not have adequate information about treatment and withdraw from social life, potentially experiencing psychological problems due to fear of rejection and prejudice.
Cerri believes that, by providing information, acting with empathy and removing stigma, the tool can exemplify a beneficial way of using AI in medicine. “These platforms are very useful, because they can make this first contact with the patient a very informative contact and the data collected from this relationship can help guide this and other patients”, she highlights.
Technology and health
The use of technological innovations and health promotion is a long-standing alliance that has contributed to greater human life expectancy and better quality of life. The professor mentions everything from more primordial examples, such as the emergence of antibiotics, to more recent advances that favor early diagnosis, such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging.
“There is always resistance to change, new technologies are often not well understood or not well accepted by society”, he considers. Initial misinformation about this mutual relationship can negatively impact society and health promotion in general.
Cerri argues that the use of technology does not play a role as a substitute for medical professionals, but as an aid to greater precision and efficiency. Algorithms that transcribe consultations to facilitate the bureaucratic work of producing medical records are examples of the use of technological innovations with tools.
Technology in the pandemic
“During the pandemic, there was an acceleration in the introduction of technology, mainly related to digital health, which allowed many consultations to be carried out remotely”, highlights Cerri. In addition to the greater practice of digital health, the specialist also comments on the use of an algorithm to speed up the diagnosis of Covid-19, based on the analysis of computed tomography scans.
The RadVid-19 initiative concerned a website to which CT scans were sent and the algorithm created diagnosed the disease and its extent. In an early scenario of the pandemic, in which doctors did not yet have experience in diagnosing pulmonary Covid and tests took around ten days, the algorithm indicated the result and extent of the disease with greater agility.
The technology directly impacted the immediate treatment of pulmonary cases, a determining factor in the survival of patients admitted to the ICU, according to Cerri. “This was an example that we experienced during the pandemic: the possibility of having an algorithm that gave quick answers about the lung involvement of Covid and how much these patients were”, she says.
The ethical issue arises, in Cerri’s opinion, in the extensive process of testing and evaluating technologies. Given the limited capacity of the health system to absorb innovations, it is essential that their cost-benefit and effectiveness are proven. To this end, the role of health regulatory agencies is extremely important in order to guarantee citizen health. “This whole path of creating a new technology, the debate, acceptance and incorporation is a progressive process”, points out the expert.