'Grace' AI robot finds 'missing piece' of data privacy and security puzzle

• Grace is moving her AI modules to the Cardano blockchain, giving her the security and data privacy needed to meet global healthcare requirements
• Created by Hanson Robotics and AI specialists SingularityNET, Grace is designed to interact with the elderly and diagnose patients
• Grace is built to relieve the burden on frontline hospital staff, who have been overrun during the Covid-19 pandemic

‘Grace’, the AI robot developed by Awakening Health, a Joint venture between Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET, to revolutionize care of the elderly, will migrate to the industry-leading Cardano blockchain to help to meet stringent regulatory requirements such as HIPAA and GDPR for data security and privacy in global healthcare. 

Grace is designed to interact with the elderly and people isolated by the Covid-19 pandemic. She looks like a healthcare worker, speaks English and Korean, and has a thermal camera in her chest which can take temperatures and measure responsiveness. Advanced programming techniques enable her to recognise and mirror people’s emotions, made possible by simulations of the muscles in the human face, giving her the empathy and social skills needed to combat loneliness among the elderly in a time where frontline workers are stretched too thin.

The robot’s ‘mind’ has been developed on local and cloud servers, but in order to scale to meet potential demand, will move to Cardano - the third largest blockchain platform, which can offer improved speed and predictable and lower costs. Crucially, it also offers increased data security and privacy, which in a space like healthcare where sensitive personal data needs incredibly stringent protection and is thus tightly regulated, is non negotiable.

Cardano is the world’s first provably secure blockchain, ensuring that Grace can achieve the levels of data security needed to satisfy medical regulators. Cardano also solves the challenges of speed and scalability, meaning Grace’s brain can operate at the highest level and process biodata quickly. It can also accurately predict and guarantee reasonable transaction fees, providing stable operating costs. 

Ben Goertzel, creator of the AI technology for Grace and CEO of SingularityNET, said: “While Covid-19 has had a huge impact on physical health, the mental health impacts will echo long after the lockdowns lift. This is why solutions like Grace are so important to combat loneliness and ease the burden on frontline workers, and with Cardano’s market-leading capabilities, she will be able to scale to meet this global challenge.

"As we gradually ramp up Grace's general-intelligence capabilities over the next few years, she will be able to serve more and more valuable functions within the eldercare and medical space – learning more and more about humanity and absorbing human values as she goes."

About Input Output 

Input Output is an R&D and product engineering company, committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide 21st century services to the 3bn who don’t have them.

We build blockchain based products for governments, corporations and academic institutions and upskill people across the world, empowering them to solve the most pressing problems faced by people in their countries.

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