Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent has introduced intelligent cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technology for crowd management in south-east Asia amid the pandemic.

The company offers a suite of products that can serve as technological guidance for smart building management, telemedicine and temperature sensor technology to enhance the efficiency of preventive measures against the spread of Covid-19.

“Crowd management is an essential measure especially when social distancing practice comes to play a crucial role again,” said Poshu Yeung, senior vice president of Tencent Cloud. “Conducting a successful crowd management programme requires good strategic planning. To illustrate this, the outbreak of Covid-19 was an important turning point for organisations to accelerate the adoption of technology into their operations in order to screen, prevent and reduce the risk of a wider public health impact.”

In view of this, Tencent Cloud says it is supporting and driving organisations forward with intelligent cloud and AI technology that can be applied to various forms of healthcare management to enhance the efficiency of operations.

Examples include hospitals or medical units where the cloud and AI technology can be employed to support an array of medical services. For example, Tencent VooV Meeting, a secure and stable cloud-based video conference offering, can be used to support long-distance clinical health care to offer initial consultations remotely to patients to enhance convenience and promptness of service. This can also be used for communications between medical personnel.

Tencent’s Aimis medical image cloud can speed up the initial patient screening process by using AI technology to read and analyse CT scan results, and to sort out the results based on symptoms from the patient’s viral transmission patterns. In addition, cloud technology can manage the filing of patient documents, such as treatment records, X-ray films and prescription documents, so medical personnel can access information anytime, anywhere.

Using cloud, AI technologies and IoT in shops and stores can help manage crowd density and increase the efficiency of area management. This can reduce manpower or procedural steps used in taking care of area management. For example, temperature sensors can detect local heat inside an area, the data from which can be processed and analysed by cloud computing and AI. Operators can therefore use these data to create a heat map to increase the accuracy of density management.

Furthermore, Tencent Cloud offers AI technology that is suitable for other healthcare community management applications, such as optical character recognition, which can convert character images and handwriting on documents into digital information for filing, and robotic process automation technology, combined with cloud and AI, to streamline work processes. This can handle regular repetitive tasks normally done by a human.

“Following the pandemic, organisations around the world are increasingly paying attention to health measures, and Tencent Cloud is committed to delivering smart services, which are efficient, stable and flexible,” said Yeung. “With in-depth understanding of large-scale platform service capabilities, our products are highly adaptable to customers’ needs. We are confident that our innovations can help increase capacities and enhance efficiency in improving the healthcare community management for every organisation.”

Tencent Cloud is Tencent’s cloud services brand, providing cloud products and services to organisations and enterprises. Leveraging its data centre infrastructures around the world, Tencent integrates cloud computing, big data analytics, AI, IoT, security and other technologies with smart enterprise scenarios for sectors including finance, education, healthcare, retail, industry, transport, energy, and radio and television.