Your Voice Is a Key Against Pathogens. Covid19 Case.
By: Layla Atya
Tags: Insurance Core System, Co Vid 19, Risk, Innovation, Voice Tech

Your Voice Is a Key Against Pathogens. Covid19 Case.

World Health Organization (WHO) continues to face the spread of virus diseases, including coronavirus, labeled as Covid-19. Businesses and governments are cooperating to limit social interaction, as it had been the best method to prevent the virus from spreading. There is no magic pill to protect people from getting sick, and the best therapeutic strategies are only supportive, aiming to reduce transmission in the community. Very few though know that 2020 is not the first time humanity has seen coronavirus. In fact, CoVs are the major pathogens of emerging respiratory disease outbreaks. We have witnessed the outbreak of acute reparatory syndrome (SARS-CoV) in 2002–2003, and H1N1 influenza in 2009. In the more recent history, Saudi Arabia reported the first identified case of coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012.

CoV pathogens, similarly to flue and rhinovirus are highly transmittable through respiratory droplets from coughing and sneezing, contact and fomites (WHO Report). Many organizations are joining forces to prevent the spread of Covid-19 (e.g., Covid-Action-Platform), however due to the nature of human interaction and necessity of minimum wage workers to seek other sources of income, our society will stay at risk.

In an attempt to support the global community, eleks team of researchers is testing several technologies that will help the global community to limit exposure to CoV pathogens through physical touch to fomites. We have identified industries that pose the biggest threat, yet are an inevitable part of our community: mass transit, credit card terminals, remotes, AC(s) in public places, printing facilities, touchpads, security fingerprint touchpads, vending machines, and self-checkout terminals are all fomites, referred to by the WHO.

We have come up with a non-ideal but a quickly implementable solution to address these exposures — our voice. Yes, we placed our bets on human voices. Our technology allows the execution of voice commands to achieve everything an individual might need.

Many technologies utilize voice to control devices and applications: Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod. By integrating our applications with already existing devices/services, like Amazon Alexa — we were able to create an architecture that allows connecting legacy devices to smart assistants. We tackled very basic legacy devices to ensure the efficiency of our technology. For the test run, we have identified that Alexa would be the best choice of the device due to its popularity in the public spaces. The second subject was a legacy air conditioner in a standard office. We used an invocation method to enable Alexa to recognize and process voice commands. Once the recognition phase was completed, Alexa sent a recognized command to the central server that generated an appropriate Infrared (IR) signal to the IT transmitter attached to the AC unit.

We have identified that the process can be replicated to other legacy devices, e.g. light switches, door lockers, elevators, and payment systems, as long as we can connect Alexa (or any voice-controlled device) to IR transmitter with a single central system.

We have also identified vulnerabilities of such technology and the chief among them is security. In the case of Alexa, Amazon can process all received data; whereas payment terminals can still require a pin code to be entered manually. Fortunately, credit cards, Apple Pay, Google pay and others started to use near field communication (NFC) technologies to enable contact-free initiation of the transaction.

We are still working on addressing security issues, but we also understand that at the times of pandemic we need to carefully choose our battles. We, at eleks, do our best to protect global infrastructure and enable our communities to live a familiar life while limiting their exposure to environmental threats.

If you are interested to explore how Voice Controlled technology can benefit your business, please contact me or my amazing colleague, Vitaliy Yuriev

Eleks is a management & technology consulting company with technical and domain expertise in retail, logistics, manufacturing, insurance, automotive and healthcare industries. As a company that developed the first optimization platform for electrical systems across East-Central Europe, we launched our U.S. operation with fintech clients (like Eagle) to foster technological innovation. Some of our projects involved advanced implementation of AI/ML to secure real-time assessment of global capital markets and so much more!