Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), the public healthcare IT shared services provider and subsidiary of Ministry of Health Holdings (MOHH), helps integrate IT into health care services and operations across Singapore. As the Singapore healthcare ecosystem is fairly complex, there is a great demand for more efficient and expedited services.
IHIS hosts a bevy of tech solutions and gadgets, specifically catered to the health industry. There are different solutions created for patients and healthcare staff. Some of which include: Outpatient Pharmacy Automated System, Digital Pathology System, Real-Time Ambulatory Patient Information Deployment Enabler (RAPIDE) system, Electronic Health Intelligence System, Tele-Geriatics, Mobile Apps, and other such services.
Recently, IHIS opened up its own ‘Innovation Space’ which showcases some of the latest healthcare innovations and aims to promote innovation culture amongst the staff and visitors.
The Innovation Space serves as a testbed for the latest healthcare technologies to produce solutions which will shape the SMART Community Care, SMART Clinic, SMART Ward, and SMART Homecare.
OpenGov spoke to Noah Tay, Senior Programme Manager, IHIS, about the recent developments within his team and how the Innovation Space will play a role in educating and inspiring those who walk through it.
IoT and other connected devices in Healthcare
IoT has proven to be a great avenue for healthcare support and innovation. Through IoT and connected devices, health related information is gathered via a body worn or home wireless sensors and transmitted to the caregiver via an information gateway such as a mobile phone. IHIS is actively looking at a range of IoT solutions which they can integrate within the healthcare sector.
“We are trying to adopt some different methodology for IoT, because IoT is something we can use at the hospital and in home care,” said Mr. Tay, “With IoT, we could use for elderlywho are staying alone and for chronic disease patients. We often think how can we use IoT to extend the care outside of the hospital.”
IoT has proven to be especially useful for those ageing-in-place as we have seen in multiple projects across Singapore, like the ShineSeniors program. IHIS is collaborating with IDA to see how they can further improve elderly care, focusing especially on factors of sociability and communication.
“We are working with government research agencies on Smart Eldercare projects. We are seeing how we can use technology to make the elderly more communicable,” said Mr. Tay, “How can we integrate them into the community using frontier technologies? For example, they could use table top projections to play a game of mah-jong with others. Gaming helps them be more active and be connected to the community”
The team at IHIS is also looking at Google Glass to develop apps that will help doctors receive critical information on-the-go. As it is hands-free, doctors can operate Google Glass using voice commands if they are moving from one ward to another, making it more functional than a mobile phone.
“To me, this is probably one of the best designed wearables that can allow the doctor to see the patient demographics, x-rays, lab results, and other such patient information. We have developed such prototypes to help the users think further, this will start to generate more ideas for Google Glass applications,” Mr. Tay told us.
Mr. Tay told us that he often encourages people to come into the Innovation Space to test out the Google Glass so they get a better feel for it, how to operate it, and they can share what they would intend to use the technology for. This has helped the team develop new apps which would are catered to the health care workflow and demands of health care professionals.
There is also the Oculus which uses Virtual Reality Technology, which IHIS is looking to use for patient rehab.
Gesture Based Solutions and Drones make their way on the scene
IHIS is looking at Gesture Based Solutions that will prove useful to Doctors during certain procedures. Gesture Based Solutions allow for hands-free interaction with hospital applications through natural movements and gestures.
“Gesture Based Technology is something we would really like to use in the hospital. Especially for infection control reasons, doctors can interact with software applications using hand gestures,” said Mr. Tay.
Another area where gesture based solutions can be used, is for remote rehab. When patients are unable or unavailable to meet their caregiver in person, they can use gesture based applications and have their results reported to them.
“For example, a patient will be able to use gesture based solutions to perform rehab activities at home. From this, the healthcare provider will be able to monitor their activity and see if the patient requires follow up therapies,” Mr. Tay stated.
Recently, OpenGov reported on an example of remote rehab solutions, witnessed at the IDA IExperience Centre. Here, we played a basketball video game created for patient at-home rehab.
Drones are an increasingly popular area of technology which could help in delivering hospital items such as medicine, documents, etc.
“A COO from one of the hospitals reached out to us to explore the option of using drones. At this hospital, there is a clinic which is located across a highway, too far for a nurse to walk to and too near to use a vehicle to drive over,” Mr. Tay told us.
Drones may also be deployed to check on building structure to detect cracks, smokes, leakages and also locate specific items/ equipment within the campus.
“Drones are commonly used to reduce manpower for risky maintenance of the building exteriors,” stated Mr. Tay, “Other countries are using heavy duty drones to deliver medications to villages through humanitarian work. We also see Amazon using drones to make deliveries to the home.”
Emerging Technologies on IHIS Radar
IHIS continues to track down the latest in frontier technologies which have shown opportunities in the healthcare sector. At the moment, IHIS is developing solutions using IoT solutions, contact tracing, robots for teleprescence, virtual reality, and other such technologies.
“We are continuously looking at leading technologies, that will innovate and transform healthcare in the public sector,” said Mr. Tay, “We work with research partners and industry experts to build solutions that will improve patient care and quality.”
Android Device Contact Tracing is an area which IHIS is working to develop solutions for. Through Contact Tracing, user contact data can be collected based on a pre-set distance and contact duration. This would prove useful during outbreak of certain pandemic.
“We will use this space to test certain apps with certain environments,” Mr. Tay told us, “For example, if they want to test android tablets being used with Google Glass. This would be the innovation space.”
In addition to technology development and testing, IHIS plans to introduce an in-house hackathon so as to encourage staffers to innovate and come up with their own ideas to improve health care through ICT.
“We are going to introduce an in-house hackathon, so as to inspire and bring out the innovators in everybody,” Mr. Tay said, “This will give them a chance to share their ideas and see what others are doing.”
During a global pandemic, mundane public policy decisions can become literally a matter of life and death. Governments and officials looking to protect the public and combat the spread of COVID-19 have discovered that digital technology is one of the essential instruments at their disposal for improving outcomes for citizens.
Slowing — and, ultimately, reversing — COVID’s spread in any population requires massive, coordinated execution of case reporting, contact tracing, and isolation and treatment of infected individuals. The greatest success stories of 2020 have featured governments that quickly implemented large-scale public programs using technology to track and trace cases, then made that data available to researchers and health care professionals. Singapore has been a particular standout, pulling testing data along with anonymized tracking data from a network of apps to successfully identify, isolate, and treat new cases quickly.
Even as they struggle through the global health crisis, public officials must face the looming challenge of post-COVID economic recovery. Most public authorities are basing recovery plans on the same kinds of digital tools they are using to fight the pandemic. The adoption of cloud, big data, and AI technologies will be vital to many countries’ economic success.
Singapore: A study in success
Long before the threat of COVID-19, Singapore’s public sector had invested in technology and digital initiatives. The Smart Nation Office, formed under Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in 2014, served as a nexus for digital transformation. Ministries and local agencies could rely on Smart Nation for the data and tools they needed to be more productive and to better engage their citizens. When the pandemic began, Singapore was already well-positioned to be one of the first countries to develop a successful, nationwide contact tracing app and token program.
As the world moves into the economic recovery phase of the COVID crisis, the tech infrastructure that Singapore built to serve its citizens may do double duty as a framework to support economic traction. Its programs encourage businesses, both local and foreign, to adopt technology. The Government Technology Agency of Singapore, known as GovTech, is functionally CIO for the whole government: GovTech’s digital initiatives, such as the National Digital Identity, the Government QR Payment, the Government Technology Stack, and the Data Science and AI Capability Framework, encourage businesses and business owners to use technology, and data in particular, to gain a competitive advantage.
Singapore, however, is not typical in the region in terms of executing digitalization strategy. Its comparatively small geographical size and political stability enhances its ability to execute its national technology blueprint. Can other ASEAN countries apply lessons from Singapore to achieve similar outcomes?
The data governance challenge
Public authorities generate an incredible volume of data, and their main challenge is finding, analyzing, and using their data. Valuable data stores reside in different departments and ministries, and often use incompatible formats or technologies. Having the ability to share information across agencies, providing access control to different levels and functional roles of stakeholders, while respecting data privacy and fighting bureaucracy, could fundamentally transform the way civil service or government organizations serve the public.
To reach that goal, the first step is to accept the need for more advanced analytics. Raw data in isolation is of no value. It must be cleaned, curated, and analyzed before anyone can use it to make meaningful decisions.
Organizations must build a centralized data hub to provide stakeholders access to this data, along with systems for data governance and data quality. With multiple sources feeding into a shared data center, incomplete, invalid, or otherwise faulty data could impact decision-making throughout the network. Data quality must become an integral part of overall data management, from onboarding new data sources to managing and maintaining data already in the hub.
Governments need the ability to understand data — where it is located, managed, and stored — to ensure their country’s digital sovereignty.
A citizen-centric approach
At the same time, governments need a citizen-centric approach to meet the population’s expectations — and to govern the country. Here, again, Singapore provides an excellent model. For example, they responded to the public desire for a better way to manage changes of address by building a single, central platform that communicates with all the services that need this information: driver licensing, taxes, and so on. Listening to the needs of the people led to an elegant solution.
Imagine what governments could do to enhance innovation and economic growth with the corporate sector. In most countries, a business owner must work with multiple departments or bureaus to register a business, file for incorporation, establish a taxable entity, and on and on. Today, we take for granted these long and tedious procedures. But that need not be the case forever.
Health care and education are two sectors in which advanced adoption of technology illustrates the benefits of focusing on data analytics. All around the world, we are seeing how protecting the population has technology at its core, from the efforts to control the spread of an epidemic to the day-to-day tracking of risk factors and early detection of disease.
A solution is more than a tool
Today, several jurisdictions have publicly funded plans to invest heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure, such as the European Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence, the China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and the Singapore National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy. But without an instant assessment of data health and accuracy, even the most accurate AI models cannot produce trustworthy results.
Only by measuring the level of trust and clarity of data across the entire organization and putting the citizen first can public service players have the 360° view of their data they need to offer the services that citizens have a right to expect.
In coping with the current crisis, the need for accurate and actionable information is paramount for an effective response – but there has never before been a scenario like the current COVID-19 pandemic. In case of a critical event, whether it is an active shooter, natural disaster or pandemic, access to information is vital.
One crucial lesson that emergency responders have learned from simulations is that information is often too fragmented to provide actionable intelligence: the larger the incident, the more complicated it is to collect and assess information and coordinate a response.
There are, however, many tools available to tame this complexity for more rapid and effective response and to minimise impact on responders. These generally address four stages of response management.
In the first, they gather data from various sources to help assess the context and severity of a critical event, calling upon analytical tools to digest and correlate data to help response teams understand what is happening now and what could or will happen later. A second stage locates assets, employees or vital equipment. In a third stage, these systems offer emergency responders and organisations the tools to act by informing people of actions to take, mass-scale notifications for people in affected areas and tools for collaboration between response teams. The final stage enables responders and others concerned to review and evaluate the critical event so that future response can be improved.
Incident response management platforms are often homegrown among responsible agencies and organisations, but technology providers exist to support efforts. Some of these technologies consolidate functionality for all four stages into a single system. Everbridge, for example, began with a focus on multi-modal text messaging after the tragic events of 9/11 and expanded into a platform used in 2012 to notify 10 million people after Hurricane Sandy, and in 2013 by the city of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombings.
As reported, Increasingly these platforms are embracing IoT systems and devices, given the expanded capability among a wide variety of endpoints that responders can use to connect directly with critical information, guidance and communication with those affected by an emergency. In particular, IoT can play an essential part in the information-gathering process. In a 2019 study, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) examined the possibilities of the use of IoT in emergency situations and identified a number of use cases such as emergency calling, mission-critical communications for situational awareness or to protect responder personnel, essential logistics support public warning systems and automated emergency response.
In smart buildings and smart cities, sensors can provide details about temperature, toxic gases and other hazardous conditions. Smart streetlights can analyse traffic congestion and plan evacuation routes through AI analytics. Body cameras can relay live intelligence from public safety workers to the Incident Command Center (ICS), while crisis teams can use IoT wearables to warn and guide civilians.
Artificial intelligence technology is used in several ways to diagnose, respond to or predict coronavirus spread. The radiology department of the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, has modified its AI-driven software to detect cancer in CT lung scans to detect COVID-19-related signs of pneumonia. This is to aid the overworked medics in triage, while in the United States, the Boston Children’s Hospital has created an AI-driven coronavirus map.
The Chinese search engine Baidu has made its Linearfold algorithm available to researchers and medical teams to fight the outbreak to assist in the analysis of the virus, while across the world researchers are turning to AI technology to predict its spread.
Even when everybody understands that it is vital to track data on people’s condition and location during the current times, but it has a definite privacy impact.
The privacy issues are relevant to technology providers, which also see a growing trend among companies that want to know which employee is in which location. In the case of the COVID-19 outbreak, employers may want to see which employee has been in close proximity to a person who has tested positive for the virus.
However, technology’s role in containing and mitigating the virus in the absence of a rapid and reliable diagnostic tool cannot be undermined. It lets governments respond and recover from the global pandemic which would have been a more herculean task than it already is.
Technology providers who are seeking to improve response, stewardship of sensitive data and transparency of processes moving forward must understand that establishing trust and confidence amongst people is of paramount importance.
While the global pandemic has not completely vanished, economies around the word are gradually opening and getting their employees to get back into the physical office.
With the risk of the virus still looming large, ensuring the safety of employees is mission critical for organisations – especially in certain industries where remote working is not a viable option.
In order to better understand the process of critical event management, OpenGov Asia spoke with Graeme Osborn, Vice-President, International Critical Event Management for Everbridge.
The discussion revolved around how different industries and organisations are formulating their return to office plans.
Graeme shared that it is a challenging time for all organisations and they are all following different approaches to deal with the current critical event.
While some do not anticipate having their employees back before the end of the year, others are coming up with new ways of tracking and ensuring the safety of their staff.
One industry that is particularly struggling is the construction industry, as unlike the office space the construction sites are not technologically enabled.
Traditional ways of doing everyday activities have to be altered in a manner that keeps physical contact between the workers to a minimum.
The office ecosystem is facing a different kind of challenge as employees are more resistant to being traced. With that in mind, employers are exploring new ways to ensure safety at work without constantly keeping an eye on their staff.
One of the ways of doing this is contact tracking. Graeme emphasized that contact tracking is very different from contact tracing.
In the former process, leverage points of information are used to understand the potential impact of the virus. Other ways include heat detection, daily health surveys, self-health certification etc.
He expounded further on the process approach involved in contact tracking. Once the application is installed by the employee, the app keeps track of whoever they encounter within a 2-meter radius. If at any point someone reports an infection, everyone they contacted and others in the organisation are informed of it through the application.
In case of a self-report, the app not only alerts the employees and the control team, it also helps contain the exposure quickly by scanning the exposure area within the organisation.
Critical events or disasters are never over; there is one after another and multiple critical events can hit us at the same time. Many parts of the world are dealing with floods, typhoons, bushfires alongside COVID 19.
Graeme highlighted in order to effectively manage multiple critical events, two aspects are very important: 1) Planning (having all the information and resources readily available) 2) Testing out the systems and processes that have been planned.
It is also important to understand that when an organisation is hit with a natural disaster or any other critical event, business continuity, life safety of employees, cybersecurity and operations are threatened.
Therefore, an organisation’s critical event management approach should unify all these business components rather than them operating in silos.
As the executive leader of an organisation, the CEO is ultimately the person responsible to lead its critical event management initiatives.
In the times of crisis and immense pressure, s/he is the one who will take the decision for the whole organisation. As such, it is very important for the CEO to be ahead of the critical event management approach.
Contrarily, when one looks at governments and public sector, it is very difficult to pinpoint any one agency or organisation to be responsible for handling critical events management as with pandemics and disasters multiple public utilities are impacted (health, transportation, food supplies, education, communication etc).
Of course, there is a collective responsibility of all the different agencies focusing of these aspects individually; and they must be directed by the leader of the country to ensure the safety of all citizens.
He concluded by emphasising that irrespective of the type of organisation it is imperative to have an integrated approach and clear leadership to effectively tackle critical events.
OpenGov Asia had earlier shared an interview with Graeme Orsborn on the value of Critical Event Management for any organisation as well as the basics steps to take in order to put in place a successful critical event management plan and how that applies in the global COVID-19 crisis today.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a sobering wake-up call to swiftly abolish corporate inertia plaguing critical event management.
COVID-19 has brought into sharp focus two primary goals – how to keep employees safe with minimal businesses disruption.
This was particularly telling in a recent high-level meeting with around 30 senior executives from major brands from Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries.
Only 7 per cent said they had a scalable solution to deal with the next critical event – bushfires, tsunami, terrorism, earthquake, flood or another economic or life-threatening situation – in a post-COVID world.
Yet, 89 per cent said critical event management was important to their business outcomes.
Most were in the dark and had no idea where to begin but all understood the dire consequences of doing nothing.
The current pandemic is an opportune time to ask if your organisation can quickly identify threats and assess the risk environment, then easily identify and locate the impacted people, assets, operational functions which could potentially be impacted.
It may be 2020 but many organisations still rely on a manual call tree to disseminate accurate information to ensure staff safety. This may be acceptable in small organisations but even they struggle to keep the basics, such as mobile phone numbers, up to date.
The process of managing a critical event is often very manual, even disjointed (some large organisations still have employee details spread across multiple Excel sheets and even in binders).
It’s often siloed using multiple applications, and it takes a significantly long time to work through. Why?
An organisation needs to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – what is the threat and the nature of the threat. What’s the potential impact? Is it related to physical security, inclement weather, or is it digital disruption due to a cyberattack or ransomware?
Is that an IT outage or application latency?
Is it a localised or national disaster?
How many different sources of data are being used to monitor threats? How effective are they and is any of it automated or filtered, and tailored to your specific business?
And can the sources of information be trusted?
Based on all that organisations need to understand and locate what and/or who’s impacted – their people, assets, and operational functions.
This is especially challenging if some staff members are on the move or the risk event is changing – as we’re faced with in the current pandemic.
Trying to correlate the two may involve accessing multiple systems and having multiple applications running at the same time.
How many different systems do you currently have that stores information about your people or assets?
And is this information integrated with your threat data to determine who or what might be impacted.
Before employees can safely to return to the office, organisations must have the capability to effectively respond to another wave or if a worker tests positive.
Critical event management systems can’t be a one-way street as staff need the ability to confirm, acknowledge or respond to alerts, information, safety check-ins, and questions or polls – no matter where they are or what device they use.
It’s time organisations stop outsourcing employee safety and well being to spreadsheets or pieces of paper. Drowning in data during a pandemic without a single source of truth will surely sound the death knell for any business.
This is an Expert Opinion by Kok Ping Soon, Chief Executive of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore)
As our healthcare frontline workers mounted a medical response when COVID-19 hit our shores in January, the Singapore Government was concurrently launching a technological response – far broader and deeper that what we did for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003.
Compared to SARS in 2003, when communication channels were largely driven by broadcast news and radio, we now have digital platforms to push out information quickly; channels such as the Gov.Sg Whatsapp channel and the COVID-19 Chatbot have provided the public with timely daily updates on the pandemic.
We also launched digital platforms for citizens to get personalised and granular information – ranging from where they can collect their masks (MaskGoWhere website), to what financial support they can get (SupportGoWhere website) to the crowd level at places of interest (SpaceOut portal).
Safe distancing enforcement at public parks is now supplemented with robotics and drones for greater effectiveness and safety. The largely manual contact tracing regime used during SARS is now augmented with digital tools such as TraceTogether and SafeEntry to improve the accuracy and speed of identifying close contacts.
COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of investing in digital capabilities. Over the past few years since the launch of the Smart Nation initiative in 2014, we have established a nationwide fibre infrastructure, nurtured a vibrant tech ecosystem, and also invested in building technology expertise and tools within Government agencies. These investments have started to bear fruit, and have allowed Government agencies to react to and manage the pandemic more effectively.
The new possible: Singapore’s digital landscape
During this COVID-19 period, our businesses and citizens are taking to digital tools at an unprecedented pace. Companies – that did not imagine remote work was possible – are now operating with majority of their workers tele-commuting. Our workforce, and even our seniors, are now experts at conducting meetings via Zoom, WebEx and Skype. Use of SafeEntry is a now a staple for everyone, with over two million users checking in/out on a daily basis; more than 1.1 million people are now receiving their latest COVID-19 updates via the Gov.Sg Whatsapp channel. A McKinsey study found that consumer and business digital adoption has vaulted five years forward in a matter of eight weeks.
With the gradual re-opening of Singapore’s economy into a post-COVID-19 world, we will accelerate investments to empower citizens and businesses with more digitally-enabled possibilities.
As the implementing agency for the Digital Government Blueprint, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore) will increase the pace of digitalisation in government by Humanising our frontend services, Engaging our community, and Modernising Government infrastructure to “H.E.M.” in the digitalisation gains from COVID- 19 to create a more digitally empowered nation.
“HEM-ming” in the new possibilities
Firstly, we aim to humanise our frontend services to create a more unified and pleasant experience when citizens transact with the Government.
We have made good progress in making our government digital services more user-centric. Citizens and Businesses’ satisfaction with government digital services has improved by eight percentage points in 2019 to reach 86 per cent and 77 per cent respectively – an all-time high since 2012.
This year, we will be making an even bigger push in humanising our services as more service-journey projects transit from design and development to minimum viable products (MVPs).
Over $118 million of projected ICT contracts in this FY is earmarked to develop better citizen and business facing applications. The current “Moments of Life” app will undergo a product refresh to evolve into a go-to app for all things related to the government in a citizen’s life in Singapore, such as birth, graduation, and marriage.
For businesses, the GoBusiness portal will evolve into a key platform for business-related transactions with the Government – to help companies start a business, grow a business, and to apply for a licence. With information conveniently available from your phones and laptops, we aspire to let citizens continue to transact and run errands as per usual, while reducing the frequency of in-person appointments.
Citizen-centric digital services will also become more pervasive. Beyond using SingPass to log in to government services and now for SafeEntry check-in, users can look forward to more value-added services such as using SingPass Mobile for digital signing of documents, and biometric login.
Second, we will engage the community in partnership to co-create and drive adoption in the usage of digital solutions. COVID-19 has shown us that no one has the monopoly on wisdom to deal with a national crisis; we are only as strong as our ability to work together.
In May, we conducted a COVID-19 Idea Sprint, which attracted over 300 participants who suggested more than 70 proposals – with ideas ranging from designing wearables for contact tracing to developing personal risk scores based on proximity data.
To fortify our engagement with the tech community, we have soft-launched a new Singapore Government Developer Portal. This is a centralised resource to help industry and developers learn more about our tech products. Developers, suppliers and industry partners will be able to find key information on product features, use cases and technical specifications to co-create solutions with us.
Finally, we will continue to modernise Government infrastructure. We will speed up the migration of government ICT systems onto the Government Commercial Cloud. More applications will be re-platformed and re-factored to leverage cloud native services to increase their agility and scalability. We will also invest aggressively in data analytics, artificial intelligence and sensor projects to enable data-driven decision making in improving services and operational effectiveness.
We will also spend $300 million to design, implement and operate a new software-defined Government Wide Area Network to support increased computing needs, and another $300 million to strengthen the Government’s cybersecurity posture with automated system reviews, cybersecurity monitoring and digital forensics capabilities.
Engineering Digital Government, Making Lives Better
To support these plans, we will deepen our engineering capabilities within GovTech. We are hiring over 400 engineers in software development, cybersecurity, data analytics and infrastructure to augment our current engineering workforce of 2,200.
As I often share with my colleagues, GovTech’s purpose in “Engineering Digital Government” so as to “Make Lives Better” has never been stronger. We will strive to push Singapore to be at the forefront of digital technology, and as one people, weather this storm together.
Power generation is the lifeline of cities. All activities come to a standstill even when there is a temporary power cut.
And although electric power has made modern life so comfortable, it comes with a great cost to the environment.
Traditionally electricity generation takes place in fossil fuel/ nuclear power plants that have huge detrimental impact on the ecosystem.
In the process of power generation, these plants emit copious amounts of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide) that degrade the air quality in the atmosphere.
The next innovator in OpenGov Asia’s Change Makers of Tomorrow series, came up with an eco-friendly method of electricity generation – from plants themselves.
Bioo is dedicated to generation of electricity from nature through unique technologies and patents of its own.
Pablo Vidarte, the CEO of Bioo told OpenGov Asia that the journey began with a vision to use nature and its organic processes as the biofuel to power batteries of the future without harming plants or any other kind of living being.
Pablo and his team collaborated with university nanotech experts to work out a prototype that could successfully utilise the tech envisioned by them.
After almost a yearlong of trials they came up with a range of products that work on the unique Bioo technology.
Bioo currently has two major lines as a part of its current business model.
1) Bioo Installations: Installations that use the proprietary technology of transforming plants into biological switches that can activate music, lights, and even screens in public spaces, making them look more attractive.
2) Research and Development: The focus is on development of products by applying the Bioo and other complementary technologies within the scope of Intelligent cities and IOT.
Two products that are currently under development are:
- Bioo Panel: A vegetal panel that is installed under the ground and that supplies power to lighting systems of parks and gardens. It enables constant electricity production during the day and at night along with saving up to 60% of irrigation water. Additionally, it is visually in line with the landscape.
- Bioo Sensor: The innovation is an alternative to the current chemical batteries used in irrigation sensors in agriculture industry that need replacement every 6 – 18 months. Thanks to the large existing need for a solution, major firms in the sector are interested in such an application, with the global market being measured in 7.9 billion euros.
Bioo uses the organic substances that are present in the soil naturally as well as those expelled by the plants through the roots. Something that happens immediately after the photosynthesis process.
These organic substances are then broken-down using microorganisms in the soil which eat them. Once the organic substances are broken, they set electrons free along with hydrogen which is naturally released during photosynthesis.
These free electrons are then used to generate electric current. And the hydrogen merged with atmospheric oxygen is used to generate water. There is no damage to the plant in this process, and in fact, the microorganisms are fed and water is generated in the process of creating electricity.
Bioo plans to launch in Europe and USA first but also wish to create a presence in Asia especially in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea.
Pablo also shared that in future, Bioo will focus on creating products and installations for smart cities that consider plants as not just decorative objects but with a utility aspect as well.
Pablo and his team have been recognised for their sustainable, out of the box thinking at various platforms.
They were selected as the most innovative company of the year by the European parliament. They are also one of the top 59 finalists at the 10th Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition.
Organised by Singapore Management University (SMU) Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, this international competition is focused on urban innovations and solutions created by student founders and early-stage startups based on the theme “Reimagine, Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Cities”.
The top 59 finalists from around the world will convene in Singapore sometime second quarter of 2021, to compete for prizes worth up to S$1.5 million at the finals.
OpenGov Asia feels honoured to learn from the new generation of innovators like the Bioo team and hopes to encourage more innovative minds to think differently.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform financial institutions (FIs), disrupting every aspect of financial services, from the customer experience to financial crime.
One of the most compelling use cases for AI is in the battle against financial crime. AI has two primary benefits for the banks engaged in this battle: it can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of financial crime investigations, and the institutionalise risk management.
Financial institutions can employ AI to analyse large amounts of data, to filter out false alerts and identify complex criminal conduct. It can identify connections and patterns that are too complex to be picked up by straightforward, rule-based monitoring, or the human eye.
This raises four fundamental questions:
- Are financial institutions ready to embrace advances in ML to help uncover emerging patterns for preventing fraud?
- How can financial institutions harness expanded data typologies generated by new authentication processes for better fraud detection?
- How can financial institutions manage the data orchestration challenges to leverage different data sources, integrate with other information, and factor in decision making across the entirety of the customer journey?
- Are financial institutions benefitting from better data orchestration?
Enhancing Anti-Money Laundering Monitoring and Driving Operational Efficiency
Digital transformation and artificial intelligence are undeniably changing the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) landscape. The need to modernise AML processes, coupled with a regulatory push towards innovation, is driving financial institutions to enhance AML monitoring & drive operational efficiency.
The manual and semi-automated nature of current AML compliance efforts slow down processing timelines and impact business productivity.
The immense volume of data that financial institutions are expected to comb through to meet regulatory requirements to detect and report suspicious activity becomes a daunting challenge.
The data is usually diverse and subpar. It’s common for systems to use only a subset of available data when generating alerts. Traditional transaction monitoring systems are unwieldy to maintain and rely on rules and thresholds that are easy for criminals to test and circumvent.
Investigation processes tend to be highly manual, from gathering the supporting data for a case to submitting a complete SAR (suspicious activity report). Meanwhile, the money launderers are working night and day to remain hidden, constantly engineering new ways to conceal the flow of funds.
Traditional Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating Financing of Terrorism (CFT) tools and tactics take longer and cost more than they should.
To fortify the defences more efficiently and rapidly, financial institutions need ways to:
- Automate tasks that formerly required human intervention, such as disposition of alerts
- Detect more risks and effectively prioritise them with sophisticated analytics techniques
- Provide richer context for investigations with access to more comprehensive insights
Financial institutions need to consider harnessing advanced analytics and AI technologies to enable a proactive, robust and unified strategy for enterprise-wide fraud and security intelligence.
Management must align fraud and cyber teams to increase cyber resiliency and minimise risk. They must deliberate how high-performance analytics and multiple detection methods can be used to monitor wider areas of risk in large volumes of data.
In the face of ever evolving and increasingly sophisticated cyber crime, integrating automation, AI and Machine Learning into financial crime programmes is essential. They facilitate more efficient transaction monitoring for suspicious activities and reduce false positives.
Developing new techniques for sound compliance practices for anti-bribery and corruption laws across jurisdictions is becoming more critical as technology moves fluidly across borders and international infrastructure.
Strategies to break down data silos, adjust to shifting regulations, and safeguard against present and future risks must form an integral part of critical event management strategy.
OpenGov Asia partners with key digital solution providers to explore how financial institutions can apply real-world AI and analytics applications to ensure a world-class integrated banking system that contributes to improve customer experiences, enterprise profitability, manage risk and regulatory compliance, anticipate fraud and create value from data.
