AI watches South Korea’s elders as human contact dwindles amid COVID-19
In a cramped office in eastern Seoul, Hwang Seungwon points a handy remote control toward a huge NASA-like overhead screen stretching across among the walls.
With each flick of the control, a colourful selection of pie charts, graphs and maps reveals the search habits of a large number of South Korean older persons being monitored by voice-enabled “smart” speakers, an experimental remote care service the company says is increasingly needed through the coronavirus crisis.
“We closely monitor for signs of danger, if they are more frequently using search words that indicate rising states of loneliness or insecurity,” said Hwang, director of a social enterprise that handles SK Telecom’s services. Trigger words bring about a recommendation for a visit by public health officials.
As South Korea’s government pushes to permit businesses to gain access to vast amounts of personal information also to ease restrictions holding back telemedicine, tech businesses may potentially find much bigger markets because of their artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
The drive, resisted for a long time by civil liberty advocates and doctors, has been reinvigorated by a technology-driven fight COVID-19. It has up to now allowed South Korea to emerge as something of a coronavirus success story but also raised broader worries that privacy has been sacrificed for epidemiological gains.
Armed with an infectious disease law that was strengthened after a 2015 outbreak of a different coronavirus, MERS, health authorities have aggressively used credit-card records, surveillance videos and cellphone data to find and isolate potential virus carriers.
Locations where patients went before they were diagnosed are published online and released through cellphone alerts. Smartphone tracking apps are being used to monitor around 30,000 individuals quarantined in the home.
Starting Monday, entertainment venues in Seoul, Incheon and Daejeon will be asked to register customers with smartphone QR codes to allow them to be easily located if needed. The necessity expands nationwide on June 10.
But there’s a dark side.
People here have often were able to trace back the web information to the unnamed virus carriers, exposing embarrassing personal details and making them targets of public contempt.
A minimal point came in early May when local media described some Seoul nightclubs associated with a huge selection of infections as catering to sexual minorities, triggering homophobic responses.
Officials reacted by expanding “anonymous testing,” which allowed persons to supply only their telephone numbers and not their names during tests. There is a subsequent upsurge in tests.
Days gone by months have exposed a stark division about the very best methods to make important decisions when privacy concerns collide with public health needs, said Haksoo Ko, a Seoul National University law professor and co-director of the school’s Artificial Intelligence Policy Initiative.
Around 3,200 persons in the united states, mostly over the age of 70 and living alone, have so far allowed the SK Telecom speakers to hear them 24 hours per day because the service launched in April 2019.
The company expects users to at least double by the finish of the year, by municipality interest. The technology has reduced human contact in welfare services while still providing governments with an instrument to avoid elderly residents from dying alone. That’s especially needed in a country grappling with an aging population and high poverty rates among retirees.
The speakers are designed with an artificial intelligence called “Aria” and a lamp that turns blue when processing voice commands for news, music and internet searches. The devices may also use quizzes to monitor the memory and cognitive functions of their elderly users, which would be potentially useful for advising treatments.
But it’s problematic for SK Telecom’s clients to utilize the information without clear regulations for handling health data on private networks.
Similar reasons could also impede domestic make use of health technologies produced by Samsung Electronics, which recently received approval for a smartwatch application that monitors blood circulation pressure.
KT, SK Telecom’s telecommunications rival, is focused on business customers, providing artificial intelligence devices such as for example speakers and service robots to hotels, offices and new apartments.
President Moon Jae-in’s administration has said data-driven industries will be critical in boosting a pandemic-hit economy.
Officials are preparing regulations for revised data laws that lawmakers passed in January after months of wrangling. They try to allow businesses greater freedom in collecting and analyzing anonymous personal data without seeking individual consent.
If they are intended, optimists say the laws allows artificial intelligence to truly take off and pave just how for highly custom-made financial and health care services after they begin in August.
But activist Oh Byoung-il said the changes could bring excessive privacy infringements unless robust safeguards are installed.
“Companies will will have an endless thirst for data, nevertheless, you can’t give it to all of them,” he said.
Doctors’ groups also have resisted government demands legalizing telemedicine, raising concerns related to data security and a negative effect on smaller hospitals.
Industrial benefits will be limited if officials can’t find the right combination of ways to process personal information in order that it can’t be used to identify individuals. Health insurance and government authorities have didn't do this through the pandemic.
South Korea’s anti-virus experience provides “plenty of lessons and implications” as it steps toward a data-driven economy, Ko said.
“With data, it’s bad to take ‘the more, the better’ approach,” he said. “A proper control system needs to be baked in to the process, to make decisions on data access based on necessity and sensitivity and restrict usage of information that isn’t really needed.”
In Seoul’s Yangcheon district, officials are employing SK Telecom’s tech to monitor some 200 seniors who live alone.
Social workers, who've smartphone apps that appear to be a mini version of the key dashboard, make calls or visits when users don’t use their devices for a lot more than 24 hours.
“It’s nice to have something to speak to,” said Lee Chang-geun, an 89-year-old who has lived alone in his small apartment since his wife died 3 years ago. “But I wish they developed an Aria function for opening doors. What good is a distress signal if I die while emergency personnel try to force open my door?”
