Posted on October, 17, 2023 at 09:32 am
Scientists from Uganda and Tanzania were among innovators at this year’s Grand Challenges Annual Meeting (GCAM 2023) in Dakar, Senegal, who demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in solving health and food challenges. It is an initiative of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Theofrida Maginga, a lecturer at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania, showed a Swahili-powered Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) chatbot she developed to help communities and farmers with early detection of diseases in maize farms.
“We have developed sensors to be placed in farms to detect the ‘mood’ of your maize plants. Whenever a disease or invasive worm strikes any plant, you will be notified with details on what your maize is dealing with exactly and what the solution is,” Ms Maginga told The EastAfrican.
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The quest was for a simple device that uses low power and requires minimal interaction with individual farmers but can be placed in the field to inform them of the goings-on out in the field.
“The chatbot can be asked simple questions and provide room for the generation of appropriate answers. We have been working to bring ChatGPT chatbots to farmers and simplify it for them to use.”
From Uganda, Joseph Mulabbi presented his innovation, EpiWatch, a ChatGPT-4 AI community sentinel system for infectious disease surveillance.
“You download the app, take a picture of your sick animal and once you upload the photo to the system, the technology can detect the disease your animal is suffering from in no time,” he said.
“It then tells you how to go about treating your animal and will even recommend veterinary doctors. We will now be able to stop epidemics before they happen because we will have data on which disease is where and even stop viruses from jumping from animals to humans,” he added.
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Other innovations on show were an AI-powered decision support for antibiotic prescription by Nana Kofi Quakyi from Ghana and “Your choice” app prototype, developed by Caroline Govathson from South Africa. Govathson’s innovation is a chatbot that helps fight stigmatisation against HIV patients.
The Grand Challenges are a brainchild of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that explore initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems.
Source: The East African