CES 2025: This AI tool lets doctors and traveling patients converse despite language barriers

What happens when millions of people gather for a global event in a country where they can’t speak the language, but suddenly need medical assistance?

For starters, try to find a way to connect people across languages, including translating sometimes vague and culturally specific personal health complaints into medical terminology that doctors can understand to quickly assess a patient’s condition and decide the level of urgency. Then there is the problem of calculating the formulation for the prescriptions created in a country and how it can be translated into medicines available in the country of prescription. In addition, you need to put in place a monitoring or tracking system that can signal potential fires before they spread in the event.

These were the challenges that faced the organizers of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, who knew that they would have to face health problems facing more than 10 million visitors and 15,000 athletes and para-athletes of more than 150 countries and regions speaking 25 different languages. To help solve it, organizers turned to a Silicon Valley company, Humetrixwho had created an award-winning Global Health Communicator based on the medical information databases it has assembled over the past 15 years.

Led by Dr. Bettina Experton, Humetrix developed health data and analytics systems, including a population-based health analytics system that enabled the government to track and predict coronavirus outbreaks among 20 million Medicare recipients and allowed the Department of Defense Joint. Artificial Intelligence Center to identify areas in the United States to send vaccines and other support during the 2020 pandemic.

For the Olympics, Experton and his team created a mobile app, powered in part by a generative AI chatbot, that international visitors could use to start the process of receiving medical assistance from first aid stations set up in the 200 places of competition in Paris and by 20,000 doctors and hospitals contracted to help the games provide care, Experton said. Patients scan a QR code, access a secure mobile app, enter their medical information in their own language, select their medications from their country and then let the system translate for them.

To help those patients, doctors had access to a database of 4 million medications and vaccines worldwide and information on 67,000 medical conditions that could be triggered by more than 4,000 symptoms. Again, all information has been translated into 25 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, German, Korean, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.

All of this had to be done while ensuring that patients’ medical information remained confidential and secure, which meant no remote storage of personal health information in the cloud or sharing of personally identifiable information with monitoring systems.

“It saves us time, it increases the efficiency of triage,” said a chief paramedic at the Paris Summer Games. A Paris-based emergency physician and volunteer at the first aid stations of the Paris Summer Games said: “Simply love it – now using it for my non-French speaking patients in our clinic.” Some hospitals have also extended this technology to all patients as part of their admission workflow, while some paramedics in the Paris region have added Humetrix QR code posters to their ambulances.

Humetrix at the CES

To CES this week in Las Vegas, Humetrix plans to expand its global healthcare platform by adding voice-to-voice capabilities that allow patients to better communicate with medical and pharmaceutical providers at the push of a button. Using GPS location, Humetrix will automatically translate and speak symptoms, medications and other relevant health information in the local language, of which 25 languages ​​are available. In these situations, AI is combined with human and clinical intelligence (ie, fact-checked) to ensure that all translations make sense and use the correct expressions when voice-to-voice communication is employed.

With its database of 4 million medicinal products worldwide, Humetrix’s technology can help you find something as seemingly simple as Tylenol in a different country that doesn’t carry that exact drug, but has a different name. with the same active ingredients. However, if a particular medication is not available in your current location, Humetrix will notify you.

Why wasn’t this voice technology used at the Olympics? Since the Olympics take place in a public place, the vocalization of personal health information where others could hear would be a privacy concern. However, in a closed-door exam room in a hospital, voice-to-voice capabilities can simplify conversation and, therefore, diagnosis.

Remaining consistent, no personal information is stored in the cloud, but is local on the user’s phone. The population-based health analysis system used by Humetrix has been on hiatus after the Paralympics, but may be reinstated depending on the use case.

This technology is available B2B, and its design deserves to be used by the travel or health industry, global organizers (such as those who host international sporting events) and governments. As Humetrix demonstrated during the Summer Olympic Games, its technology can be successfully used to track symptoms and monitor the spread of diseases, which could be particularly useful during another global disease outbreak.

Health has previously been a barrier to travel, preventing many from experiencing new cultures in the name of accessible medical care. However, with technology like this bridging the gaps in international health care, these barriers to accessing our global community could soon become greater. Information is power, especially when it comes to our health – and that should not be limited depending on where you are in the world or what language you speak.