Microsoft announced its Premonition Cloud, which uses Azure to aggregate and analyse data to predict and fight disease outbreaks.
“Now we get to build a network that can monitor the small – so that we can predict the big," said Ethan Jackson, senior director of Microsoft Premonition.
Microsoft Premonition’s robotic sensing platform will capture, collect, aggregate and analyse data about mosquitoes, ticks, microbes, viruses and other disease-causing pathogens to detect unseen biological threats.
It’s an advanced early warning system, and like weather prediction, it uses cloud-scale computing, leveraging latest advancements in Azure IoT and Azure Data Lake on Microsoft Azure.
Also read | Google’s open source data to study impact of COVID-19
The US-based company will build one of the most advanced biothreat detection networks in partnership with Harris County Public Health. It will also build this in other parts of the world later.
Microsoft estimates that 60% to 75% of the emerging infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that jump from animals to people, including the coronavirus.
