New funding boosts AI-driven public health projects in the Global South
There were no hospitals in the small village where Assistant Professor Jude Kong of the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health grew up in Cameroon. No local doctors. He remembers feeling neglected by the health-care system, resorting to home remedies due to lack of access to health information and professionals.
Now, as director of the Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium and the University of Toronto’s Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Modelling Lab, Kong is working to harness the power of responsible artificial intelligence (AI) to improve public health in communities like the one he grew up in.
“Can I create proactive tools that would have saved my relatives that died from malaria when I was growing up? That’s what we’re looking for,” said Kong. In support of this search, the Dalla Lana School of Public Health recently received CAD2.15 million for a research project led by Kong.
The project, called AI solutions for One Health approaches to epidemic and pandemic prevention and response, is jointly funded by IDRC and FCDO. The project builds on the success of the IDRC-funded AI for Pandemic and Epidemic Preparedness Network (AI4PEP), founded by Kong in 2022. AI4PEP is part of IDRC’s Artificial Intelligence for Global Health program, a CAD15.5 million investment also launched in 2022.
AI4PEP benefits from the insights and efforts of more than 160 researchers with projects across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East.
AI4PEP has already spurred 15 responsible AI-driven health projects, including an app that improves polio detection in Ethiopia, a chatbot that helps identify fake news in Brazil, an air quality surveillance system in South Africa that pinpoints areas of concern, and a cough monitor in Peru that enables users to screen for respiratory infections. Each project was put through a rigorous framework to ensure that the use of AI is ethical, safe, inclusive, rights based, green and reflective of Global South perspectives.
The new IDRC-FCDO funding will further the growth of these projects and support five additional projects strategically selected based on thematic, geographic and/or linguistic gaps in the network.
With urbanization, globalization and climate change, disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent and severe. But responsible AI solutions have the potential to detect the spread of a disease before it ever happens. These initiatives offer proactive solutions by enhancing surveillance, diagnostics, education and public health outreach.
“We have AI solutions that we have created, and, with this additional funding, we will be able to scale and sustain true, continuous collaborations with the communities we have been working with and the researchers across the Global South and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, as well as policymakers and governments in 21 countries around the world,” said Kong.