Software Can Fight Coronavirus. We’re Counting on You.
Everyone knows it’s been a tough time for businesses. All flights, conferences and in-person meetings have been canceled. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has even made us all stand apart from each other and, if anything, bump elbows only. Times are tough.
For those of you in the software business, you know you’ve got it easier than some industries. You CAN work from home. You CAN continue developing. And you should, too. Because software and developers are at the front lines in the battle against COVID-19.
Global Development for a Global Problem
In a variety of important ways, software applications and the developers behind them are helping to combat novel coronavirus worldwide.
Coding To Help Breathe Easier
As reported in Wired.com, software that reads CT lung scans used primarily to detect cancer is now rapidly being redeveloped to look for signs of pneumonia caused by coronavirus. Healthcare and hospitals are embracing the latest cloud, AI, and IoT interface technology to combat the spread and accelerate the detection of the virus. Keep on developing.
AI Attacks The Problem
There was a project initiated in the radiology department at Zhongnan, where the medical staff is now using an artificial intelligence software tool created by Beijing startup Infervision, to detect visual signs of pneumonia associated with COVID-19 on images from lung CT scans.
The tool has been deployed at many hospitals in China already, and more than 32,000 cases have been reviewed. The startup was founded in 2015 with funding from Sequoia Capital, and it is an example of how China has modernized its health care and embraced artificial intelligence to medicine in partnership with Silicon Valley firms. Keep on developing.
CI/CD Helps Speed Solutions
Siemens Healthineers and Verifa, a CI/CD company have significantly accelerated release cycles of their software platform for their next-generation medical devices. At SwampUp 2019, Jacob Lärfors and Ravi Sudhireddy shared their experiences in building Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for a functional safety project in the Embedded Medical (FDA/62304) market. They implemented pipelines that are shown to facilitate higher levels of compliance, testing, quality, and security. Such implementations can help companies in healthcare speed up the software updates, release and fight against deadly diseases. Keep on developing.
Updates For Updates
Healthcare software company Epic Systems Corporation sent an update to customers intended to help them detect potential cases of the novel coronavirus. Epic provides travel screening questionnaires to healthcare staff. Now, healthcare organizations will automatically get the new coronavirus alert within Epic’s travel screening application with the software updated to provide a notification with each update in the spread of COVID-19 and any related travel restrictions, recommendations and policies. Keep on developing.
Software for Social Distance
China has developed an app, called “Close Contact Detector,” which aims to mitigate the spread of the virus by alerting people with warning signs and other features. The app is designed in such a way that helps users understand and take precautions if they’re at risk of contracting the disease. It calculates how close in proximity they are to an infected person.
The app has the capability to alert users when they are in close proximity to someone showing signs of having the coronavirus symptoms. Keep on developing.
Data Drives Action
An open-source software tool called Nextstrain, can show where new and ongoing cases of the virus are coming from. This makes it an important tool that can reveal valuable information for health officials, scientists, and researchers who are trying to determine and analyze whether the new cases are appearing in their countries because of international travel, or being transmitted locally. This type of information for analysis is precious to public health. Keep on developing.
What You Do Makes a Difference
It’s reasonable to ask a lot of big questions about health, data security and information exchange in times like this. You need to secure your source code, binaries, networks, and delivery systems to continue to be responsible and forward-looking. While JFrog certainly has some of these tools, the entire industry is focused on delivering help where it matters most through open, free or accessible tools. Keep on developing.
The world of software has a lot to offer in the time of crisis, and we all can always hope and work for the best, with creative minds coming together to come up with both temporary and permanent solutions for this coronavirus.
We know we’re not all on the front lines. We’re not all developing for medical equipment or applications. But we can, as developers from home, make a difference in our industries, our companies and the health of the world’s people and economies.
Keep on developing. Keep on delivering.
Together, we’ll beat this thing.
