KUALA LUMPUR, 30 September, 2015 – Dr Dhesi Raja (MD) and his teammates may have just ended our battle with dengue. Dr Dhesi, winner of the Singularity University Global Impact Competition 2015 that was brought to Malaysia by Genovasi and ECM Libra Foundation earlier this year, was given the opportunity to showcase his innovative idea, a platform for detecting dengue using artificial intelligence, at the NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley.

 

As the main organiser of the Global Impact Competition in Malaysia, Genovasi’s aim is to support the development of innovative ideas to positively impact the country and the world.

 

As the winner of the Global Impact Competition 2015 in Malaysia, Dr Dhesi received a scholarship to attend the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program at NASA alongside 80 classmates from over 35 different countries. During the 10-week programme, Dr Dhesi and met his three co-founders and course mates Jamal Robinson (United States), Zhen Zhang (United States/China) and Rainer Mallol (Dominican Republic) and together with Dr. Peter Ho and Professor Ting Choo (Malaysia) who developed the initial platform in Malaysia with Dr Dhesi Raja three years prior, co-founded Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology (AIME).

 

The med tech startup is focused on improving the way disease outbreaks are managed, by predicting the exact geo-location up to 400 metre radius of the outbreaks as far as three months in advance. AIME creates an index to forewarn government agencies, non-government organizations, communities, and medical practitioners to enable focused preventative public health efforts to reduce infection, improve quality of life, increase economic productivity, and ultimately save lives.

 

Touting its platform as ‘The future for disease prevention’, AIME is currently focusing on dengue, which affects 440 million people annually with 2.5 billion people at risk. Dr Dhesi describes that approximately USD440 million is spent on average per affected country due to unplanned dengue outbreak management. “When countries do not know where the next outbreak will happen, public health officials tend to spend valuable resources in management control techniques such as fogging, larviciding, genetically modified mosquitoes and health awareness campaigns”, Dr Dhesi explains. In the future, it will release platforms for other diseases such as flu, HIV, and malaria.

 

Instead of using traditional methods of communicating via newspapers, radio and television aids, AIME will distribute educational information and outbreak warnings via telecommunication (text and SMS) and online tools.

In October 2015, AIME will conduct a pilot with its Brazilian partner, VivaRio, in Rio de Janeiro.  AIME will then expand the platform to Sao Paulo and the rest of Brazil in preparation for the 2016 Summer Olympics.