DigiitaLink, a start-up evolving in the field of web and mobile application development offers an innovative solution in the fight against Covid-19. Its application “Alafia wincovid-19 is a decision support tool for the detection of risk cases thanks to the artificial intelligence integrated by the designers. Alafia was selected among the 3 best African projects during the recent call for tenders launched by Smart Africa, an organization of the African Union whose mission is to promote digital projects for the socio-economic development of the continent.
The promoter of DigiitaLink, Koumadi K. Enuayi says that, the solution has two interfaces: “there is the front office, what the average user sees, and the back office. The front office allows the user to create an account from which he will provide information on his state of health. He creates this account in a very simple and anonymous way by giving information on his clinical history in addition to his phone number. In order to avoid exposing personal information to users, because this is public health data, it is very important to respect the confidentiality of the data collected while respecting the rights of our fellow citizens whom we are justly seeking to save from Covid-19.”
So as soon as he connects, he informs the rhetorical questions by answering yes or no to the known symptoms of Covid-19. Each day, in the menu: “health information”, the user gives information on the symptoms he experiences. This information is sent to the database to allow health authorities to manage and process it behind it. We did not consider it useful to allow the user himself to know his state of infection directly from his Dashboard to avoid unnecessary psychoses in the population as is the case in some countries where solutions similar are already deployed.
This prerogative is therefore left to the health authorities who, from the administration, can detect via geolocation and this in relation to the information sent via telephone numbers connected to the application, the so-called risk cases. Enuayi adds that, “ health authorities can thus via triangulation of the telephone number detected as being at risk, seek the individual behind this number at risk, bring them back to the clinical conditions conducive to screening as well as to care if the clinical test was confirmed, since until then it had only been unconfirmed mathematical data. Cases that could prove negative despite having been detected by Alafia’s algorithm. If it’s a false alarm, the user can safely go home. However, this will constitute precise and indexed data for the health authority, which will then be able to focus on another target of risk cases.”
He reveals that, “artificial intelligence which is behind our application, and on the basis of data published by WHO recently, the possibility of detecting people at risk further to the data sent by the system with a very small margin of fault. The app detects information that helps identify risk cases by clearly listing the phone numbers of people who may be at risk. With this data, the health authority can go to these people to be able to detect them. Since test kits are becoming scarce, it would be an opportunity for our States to use them rather on people who are already assumed to be at risk.”
“Our application is now 90% ready. It is a public health application that requires large processors for the servers and therefore is very expensive. These are servers that we first put off to limit their rental costs in the cloud. All the experiences we had to do have already been done. We are just waiting for the Gabonese health authorities to understand and take this solution and even improve it, why not, because we are not from the medical profession. We just put out ideas for solutions through our system and it would be nice if together we could work on improving Alafia for the good of all Gabonese here and now, because apparently the virus is far from disappear.” The tech expert says. }