SEATTLE, March 30, 2022 - Dr. Peter Small, the Chief Medical Officer for Hyfe, Inc., an artificial intelligence company with a tool to detect and track cough using smartphone applications, was invited to deliver an intervention to the G20 Meeting in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on March 29 and 30 2022, as part of a side meeting focused on the role of innovation in public health.
Speaking from his +35 years professional experience at the forefront of the fight against the TB epidemic, Dr. Small urged the G20 countries to embrace digital innovation in the fight against TB with the same determination that they have responded to the Covid19 pandemic.
“There is a clear path out of today’s TB crisis”, said Dr. Small, “integrate and scale what TB showed to be possible in 2019 using the digital mindset of the COVID response. By embracing digital technology, TB care and control would hitch its wagon to the exponential engine of global innovation. To bend the epidemic curve downward, we need to bend the digital innovation curve upward”.
Dr. Small, who has left the public sector to join Hyfe in 2021, has urged the G20 countries to bring the sense of urgency and the focus on data and digital technology that they demonstrated during the Covid response to other global health threats. Failing to do so will perpetuate the chaotic and inefficient propagation of unimpactful technology and ultimately cost billions of dollars and millions of avertable deaths. With leadership and strategic funding from the G20, we can pivot tuberculosis from crisis to exponential progress.
In many countries the Covid19 response has accelerated progress on their diigital health agenda, however, more efforts are needed to strengthen syndromic surveillance and to embrace novel digital innovation methods in screening, remote patient monitoring and patient self-care.
About Hyfe:
Hyfe is the global market leader in cough frequency detection (“Fitbit for cough”) and is developing classification capabilities that allows its deployment in screening and diagnostics (“Shazam for cough”). Hyfe’s models are trained on the world’s largest and most diverse dataset of cough and cough-like sounds, containing more than 250M cough-like sound samples, all of them collected from the real world, across all continents and socio-demographic segments.
Contact person for press inquiries (Hyfe):
Dr. Peter Small
peter@hyfe.ai
