To help people carry out a self-check about any potential coronavirus infection , thus reducing the risk of cross infection caused by panic and seeking medical care inappropriately, Tencent Health has built a COVID-19 self-triage assistant with AI technology for people around the world. By translating professional medical guidance into easy-to-understand messages, this tool was designed to help the public fight the pandemic with knowledge and skills. Since its launch, the tool has already helped 40 disease control and prevention centers, more than 300 hospitals, over 30 independent software vendor partners across 17 provinces in China and served tens of millions of people. Tencent is now open-sourcing the COVID-19 self-triage assistant （https://static.wecity.qq.com/covid-19trend/dist/index.html） which is available on GitHub, supporting global developers’ efforts to help combat the pandemic with AI.

Tencent Health’s COVID-19 self-triage assistant follows the Diagnosis and Treatment Protocol for Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia published by the National Health Committee of the People’s Republic of China, using natural medical language processing technologies to construct a graph for respiratory disease diagnosis information. It seeks to help users with symptoms such as fevers and coughing to conduct a preliminary self-evaluation of their illnesses quickly and seek medical care appropriately. By having rounds of virtual conversations with users to gather information such as the history of being in contact with COVID-19 patients, symptoms and characteristics of diseases, and history of underlying health problems, the virtual assistant will assess the possibility of infection by referring to professional medical guidance and then provide preliminary suggestions on treatment or self-quarantine accordingly.