The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I guess we are live now. Welcome to this session. Leveraging the internet and environment in resilience and I would like to also welcome Amali who will be co‑moderating. She should be online here. Do we see here? Okay, here. Amali has found it as dynamic on her data‑driven health technologies and we are proud to be able to moderate this session at the IGF in Norway. And so we will first, we should now be able to see the next slide. Yes,this is our agenda.
>> AMALI DE SILVA‑MITCHELL: Thank you, Jörn, I will pass the online moderation to Dr. Gomes quickly. I just want to make a couple points before this session starts and I want everybody to think globally and integrated and when you are making policy decisions please think as an integrated policymaking opportunity for... and especially governance frameworks and so forth. Just want to make this very simple point. The WHO has mandate ed that the health matters are an integral part of climate change issues.
And we need to look at that from the perspective of the whole community so an ecosystem of services. And this will include public safety, emergency, ambulance, hospitals, doctors, and citizens and so forth. So I just want to make this very simple comment about this important step, integrating our services, and how we have a tremendous opportunity with ICTs to help in this enabling of this very important situation of the climate and how humans, animals, plants are going to survive for the future and I will now pass it to João.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you for the quick introduction and also good welcome. I am not able to be in‑person with you but hopefully I can support online with the speakers as well with the speakers we have online. I will make a brief note about the agenda. As you can see projected at the moment as well, we will start with some keynote introductions. We have several speakers that will join us that are not all part of the dynamic coalition on data‑driven technology.
So we have a diverse background of people joining us and then we will have mostly the partners of this coalition. We are mindful of the time and we will have everyone speaking sharing their thoughts on that and then I will bridge into a discussion section where the room will be open for comments, questions or ideas. From anyone either online which I will take care of and collect and then share to the room. Or in the room itself and Jörn will bridge the question to the speakers. And make sure that the comments have a good grounding and a good place for them to be shared. And without further notice I will pass the word back to the room to Jörn so we can proceed with the agenda.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I would liked to take at control in leveraging the internet and environment and health resilience. Of course we have seen that connectivity boost resilience. But of course the total dependence of the network makes outages instantly disruptive for payment systems and supply chains and makes hospitals vulnerable to cyber attacks as we all know. When we go a step further with large‑scale collection it's a double‑edged sword. There's early warning and concern with diseases yet the same data can establish new inequities or hardwire old ones. Visible is the breast cancer research where prostate cancer studies and just one example I would like to point out in the next slide when it come to AI this double‑edged sword will even further sharpen. AI can propose optimal care or be used by governments or industry to triage health care according to a criteria quietly determining who is excluded. So the internet, data and AI can strengthen health care resilience and resilience to environmental and challenges. But they also introduce not only additional technical vulnerables but a hard to detect potential for government abuse. Let's take a look at some statistics here we see that the incidence of breast cancer and prostate cancer is about the same but the funding is far from the same.
We sea the government is half and the philanthropic funding is much less than half. This is one example and imagine that the data in AI can be used or abused by governments to focus on specific population groups where they want to allocate more funding and the data will make it possible to analyze exactly where such funding have an effect on increasing inequities and this of course is a risk that we face and these inequities will not be transparent. They will not be visible because those decision can be made in the dark and can be hidden behind decisions that seem to be neutral. So just as a short introduction where there are hidden risks I don't want to extend my time further and give back to João to moderate the next keynote.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much Jörn I move on now quickly to June Parris, a retired specialist nurse in primary care health. A former member. And an activity civil society health initiatives member from Barbados so June, if you are with us in the room, I will now give you the word.
>> June Parris: Good evening, good everyone to everyone in the room and everyone online. My name is June, I am retired as you mentioned but I have been involved with IT for a number of years as a nurse I worked in Europe and all health care in Europe I would like to say the UK is with ‑‑ connected to the internet and health care systems.
I had those experiences working in a developed country and then I retired to Barbados. It was not the same when I got there. It's not easy for them to keep up with what is happening in the first world. My colleague has eluded to some of the problems that we would have faced. Mainly, economics, catching up is difficult, and we have to rely on expertise from overseas, Europe, and North America. We also have to rely on experts coming in to give advice. And we also rely a lot on funding. How far does this funding go? Okay. You know in the Caribbean we suffer from, I wouldn't say suffer, we have natural disasters, so we take one step forward and two steps backward. Most of the time. Therefore, any systems that are put in place are funded by experts and expertises, people from all side, and North Americans and Europeans, we have to keep repeating this funding and spread in the resources out to accommodate all the changes we would want to make. As you can see that would be very difficult with limited we sources so apart from natural disasters, there's also a climate of culture do you really want to change? Is it easy to make changes in a culture, in an island culture where people have island, the way we think in the islands is not the same as the way we think in Europe having the experience working in Europe. Basically we don't really think outside the box. So there's also other problems namely the cost of the internet, access to the internet, maintenance of internet systems and basic use of the internet. We are in a developing world. And we have all these problems, you know? We have as I mentioned before, we have the natural disasters, we have Sargassum weed. Have you heard of Sargassum that is creating absolute problems on the island.
Health in terms of fishing. We had a natural disaster where fishing boats were destroyed and they were unable to fish to go fishing for a while. The cost of living went up. Health problems increased and then you know it all reflects back on finances. We are trying, we are trying to improve. We are employing experts. We are receiving funding but we have to put it to good use therefore where does the internet come in? How can we afford to keep up‑to‑date with all the other places in the world way ahead of us? So I'm thinking that we need to educate. Education is very important. We need to... good use of resources. We need to improve our facilities. And we need to think ahead and plan ahead by having, more research on the systems trying to understand how to deal with these systems. And to put internet use in good, in good use I would say. So this is, I think I'm going to wrap up now. I think I've said everything that I want to say and my other colleagues will add to it.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much, June, and this is a good segue to Jason. I will pass to him and he can follow‑up on your words as well.
>> Jason: Hi, good morning, everyone, I hope you can hear me. So as June would have just mentioned we in the Caribbean have a number of not entirely unique but definitely very in our face challenges we depend heavily on external resources which means that any funding agency that targets us for aid will usually make us an offer but the same thing will also come with concerns and conditions. Or a set of constraining factors that will limit the actual potential to maybe fully address an issue in a way that is fully beneficial for us based on some of the boundaries that were put in place. We have many challenges as it relates to air quality because we get affected by things like the fairly constant flow across the Atlantic. It's a very important and natural process but certain aspects of these processes have been enhanced by climate change, for example, as June mentioned the intrusion of seaweed which continues to get worse within the Caribbean region. We also have the formation of tropical systems such as hurricane burrow which did significant damage to us even though it didn't hit us entirely directly and as June would have mentioned destroyed much of our fishing fleet. We also have caused issues within our island such as outputs from industrial agricultural processes, Barbados is known for its production of sugar and we have many cane fields which farmers use pesticides and herbicides onto control weeds and that sort of stuff but because of the permeable nature of our rock that seeps into our grown water supply so we have a lot of individual challenges that can combine into larger challenges and in seeking external help we have to depend on the boundaries that are put in place by every agency that offers us help. And it may not allow us to fully remediate any of the issue. We also have problems with fires. There's a culture of burning in Barbados for example where despite having laws to regulate the hours within which you can burn in the area and which you can burn vast sections of open lots and other areas where there are known physical buildings are burned every year because that's the culture of the past time and dissemination of information is difficult in this age because of things like the rise of the influencer as opposed to cultures moving towards embracing information from specific state sources. The internet has been used to a point by the state and using Barbados as an example but not enough to say that all the potential for its use has been manifested so we could have more information about proper waste disposal site to help with our issue. Dumping is a very large issue in Barbados as well and all of these things effect the soil quality. Due to the permeable nature of our rock. So our grown water systems are vast and that is within a very small surface area. So the potential for the internet to regulate public perception is very strong in Barbados and it has not been used as well as it could. In the future, this could be changed in a more meaningful way, sorry, I'm losing signal. Yes, it could be leveraged in a more meaningful way to make sure that people are more aware of certain aspects of governance within Barbados and policies that have been made to protect the public as opposed to spreading misinformation about the same things. I think I will wrap up there.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much Jason I didn't properly introduce you but you are working with Barbados as well and it is clear that this is not one sided because June Parris mentioned many of thes a pecks that were voiced and echoed but definitely added a different perspective to the topic.
So thank you for that. Without further ado as well I will also introduce Ari yet ta. With a strong background and a formal focal point so I will now give you the words Henrietta. I believe you're with us online. You are muted Henrietta.
>> HENRIETTA AMPOFO: Hello? Sorry, English and I'm Dr. Henrietta Ampofo and as rightly introduced.
I will just touch on solutions and prospects look at our topic. Environment, health, resilience and the internet and how do these come together? Currently I'm speaking from Dakar and it's an epitope of how these three come together to solve problems. Over here I'm speaking to researchers and this is sponsored by the Gates Foundation to power and equip researchers with skills to be applied in malaria modeling. How does environment come in and how do we provide solutions? In these fields? So, for example, right, with the malaria modeling, you can find out at which point in the year you have an increase incidence of malaria. Especially from the effects of climate change and the fact that malaria is effective upon disease. You may have an increased incidence of malaria during certain seasons and you're able to put in that model and identify the factors that are increasing it now you are able to as June mentioned allocate funding to areas that are in need. You can even subdivide it into populations that are even more susceptible and so these are the ways by which the internet can support this, right? Now most of modeling we are using datasets, right? And these are sitting in on service, on, and being accessed through cloud computing. Some of the modelling is done online and the datasets and the information is available to researchers and interested participants or interested policymakers online so that internet now is facilitating the combination of health resilience just using malaria as an example to be able to bring out solutions and to be able to implement interventions in a timely manner. If we are able to now have this data broken down and you realize that a particular population maybe children are more susceptible that can also influence vaccine interventions, right? The facts that we think that vaccines, malaria vaccines should be given to them and so in all of this is internet is very integral in the area of climate, in the area of environmental health N the area of health resilience. And I would like to end here I'm sure the other people can share wonderful experiences. But we must also remember the internet governance is integral.
It supports the infrastructure. On which we can not just identify problems, not just offer solution but also disseminate solutions, right? We talk about integrity of the data. We are talking about cybersecurity, how safe is it, how we sure that data is not tampered with. How accessible. How different parts in Africa have different connectivity issues all these come into play when we want to use the internet for good. Thank you very much.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much Henrietta and best of luck voicing these concerns where you are at the moment. Thank you for finding the time as well to join and I will also now pass the word to Alessandra, a medical doctor and a chair of the young working group of the federation of public health associations and I believe you have you have a presentation to share so let's see if that also works out with you sharing the screen.
>> Alless Sandro: Thank you for the kind introduction and I hope you can see my presentation. Can you see?
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: We see a WhatsApp conversation.
>> ALESSANDRO BERIONNI: Good morning I hope you are doing well. I hope you are fresh in Oslo. Here it is boiling. And here we have the working group of public health associations. I wanted to start addressing my presentation with a, this title I think is resonate quite well with the topic that you were mentioning. So the health resilience internet in environment and health resilience so from the public perspective I want to center this discussion with a quick speech on web and well‑being. How the net can actually threat the potential well‑being in the public health in general in this really interesting area that we are living nowadays. I will go with a quick introduction, explain some public health and the internet cross play, some challenges and priority solutions. So introducing myself from start I have been working with AI and I cofounded the Italian AI association in medicine working for young innovators quality of care group. And finally working with the world federation of public health association. So there is a common thread around health and innovation which I am really passionate about. So I will go first what is the current main activities and, sorry, the main of the internet in public health and resilience I would say. So most of the speaker has already said and it I will already say, mostly the internet is announcing, I would say early warning system for most of their concerns either climate made or so on. And the remote care for underserved areas and for public health communication in education. There is a but. Because as many of the speakers have discussed previously, not everyone is addressed. There is a huge digital divide. That is a main concern in the public health concern indeed only one‑third of the global population, only two‑thirds of the global population are aligned and have access to internet and 2.6 billion are not achieving connection because of the areas they live in. And youth, the most connected people. So the rate of 72% of the general population. So as a youth group, I would like to remark that and how the youth people can address the best and use the best the internet and all the digital tools we are daily exposed to. There are some problems, some challenges which is the digital divide. Not everyone has access to it. Many of the people we are collaborating with in Africa are not always available or have chances to connect to internet. There is a huge problem with the misinformation as we all saw with COVID with the vaccination situation with political situation as we are seeing as well and ethical data governance in terms of transparency, accountability of data. Again with all the neural networks we cannot most of the time track how the data is going so this is very interesting to understand and I will move to the next slide which is one of my, I will say core slides. Been reading recent this book which I recommend is nexus from Noah. And there are three core parts that I wanted to share with you today because I really also resonate with the competence of health first of all nowadays we are not living with an informed system so we have this source of information and what is all this going through. Secondly the algorithm are mostly based on engagement drive so they're engagement driven algorithms rather than value driven algorithms and this is the main challenge I personally think so. And finally, we need to restructure global governance to digital global governance as the UN is doing for example with the global digital compact with the AI, governmental body, but this is something that needs to be also brought to the national level to enhance the regulation around all these tools. So what we are doing as group of young developers, we have some priority actions including the design and digital tools for inclusivity. Keeping this in mind. Promote digital governance through frameworks and quality standards of course advocating as civil society and multisector collaboration across health, environment, tech education and so on. These are some of the achievement we have had. We do lots of advocacy around the world health assembly and many other collaboration with the Council of Europe and so on. Again, one of our critical pillar is the capacity building. So allowing people to have digital literacy and giving them ability to use the digital tools meaningfully and also finding ways to trade either in the communities, the trade, the health workers through the digital tools we advocate for. This is some of the conference we organize around if you want to participate the next one is December 26th in Capetown. And another point I wanted to address is how internet is allowing people to cocreate solution, in civil societies allowing better participation to these platforms lets say. So about to end I just want to remark that the point of the ecosystem that is our strategy for addressing the current challenges in this internet sustainability current situation. The first point is enhancing bottom up innovation to address these public health challenges and there is lacking also of funds not only of innovation lately and secondly structure this kind of solid platform framework that can allow this innovation process to go through all this repeated steps in order to get grounded on the specific implementation, let's say country or so. So I'm bringing you two example. One is what we are oranging on jewel July second and then a call for global ideas on social innovation.
To showcase how public health can be advanced through the technology. So just to remark all these points, we would like to call for an internet that is more sol... that can provide early action that can also be assured resilience worldwide so we are put at the forefront. This is a take home message. Youth are the forefront for the internet and the web. Secondly innovation is essential in public health. And also we claim for a renewed digital social contract to put people in line first before profit and engagement, let's call it. Nothing, I'm sorry for running a bit late, one minute or two, so yeah, if you want to connect with me or with a WFPHA these are my contacts and back to you.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much not just for the thoughts but for the actions, the events are organizing even the book recommendations that are set in here. I would probably ask you later, for you to forward the presentation so we can share these resources and have them available. Thank you. And also as you mentioned taking into account that we are already slightly over time and since we don't want to overrun the session I will now bring the word back to the room. I believe we have Amado, a veteran in informatics and is a key figure in Latin America. Amad do. You have the floor now.
>> Amado: Right now the main turn of these from IGF is mainly to introduce the community, how can you participate in a multistakeholder model in order to integrate all these new trends in technology.
Like AI. Or quantum computing, into the health care environment and health care services. Right now our focus as Amali mentioned as the very beginning is to approach these social factors of health which are very pretty much related to the resources of tools that we already have from different modes already available at the market and where we are trying to provide the, the society with the the proper resources in order to manage the, their own well‑being and their own health and the new trend is right now, not only to prevent a total to help the society how to improve their health and to become partners of these health care which is one of the SDGs. I encourage every one of you from the technical community to join our efforts in order to integrate this intergovernmental medicine firewalls that are currently measured in different environments. Into the social determinants of health are also very well observed in... and included in today's agentic models and also the technical community who are really deeply engaged in the neurological basis of behaviour which are already incorporated into these new computic theory in terms of how to really take advantage of AI.
Into the health care arena. I thank you, everybody, for your interest and please join us. You can see all our documents already published into the IGF home page and we will be very happy to share with you our ideas, initiatives and goals for the next coming 5‑10 years. Thank you very much.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you so much Amado and I will do exactly the same which is to add the recommendations of events and even actions that WCs is taking onto the session reports where everyone can follow up and even join if wanted. And I will now see in the room I also saw earlier Yao sow sow sitting with you. Yao you have the word.
>> YAO AMEVI A SOUSOU: In this topic I want to share perspective on the topic from the measures I run last year.
Starting from last year into early this year in Berlin regarding the gap between the promise health and the reality for people who are in need of the health solutions. During my session I conducted many. I found out, that actually gap between the need the people and the proposal solution that I made available to them on a daily basis. Let's take two example of a young 18‑year‑old student who is usually rely on self‑medications when he seeks or goes to a local pharmacy because of long waiting time at the hospitals. Or maybe because of lost of trust in the medical professionals. And look for this care for them is like a last resort so they don't trust them unless it's a case of a father who is also a social worker who have less income who views these financial medical taking care of their family as a big financial hardship. So they look for traditional medications instead of going through the formal health care system which they found very expensive for them and they, these are not just unique stories. They are represented daily reality of countless family that I met during my research and for them, we, resilience is about survival. Is about also treatments like malaria where the cost will be bearable for them. For most of them the cost of those treatment is almost a monthly income, a monthly salary for the whole family so those are issue I got. And also saw the way, potential medical help available but there were a lack of awareness about those solutions. And those solutions when even on ground, the professionals, they are not using the solution available. And most of what I found out is that most of the patient I interviewed during the research they didn't trust on the solutions. And even the doctors, they use the platform, they confirmed that none of their patients are using those and most of the barriers are deeply rooted in the lack of the human aspect as a profound lack of awareness and deeply seeded mistrust in the health care system extending to it on the digital tools also and secondly, there's accessibility gap in the hub. Most of the people interviewed are not really proficient in the official language that they use. So there's a barrier also in terms of lack of low literacy level. Thirdly, affordability remains a big challenge, a big hurdle and this kind of gap can help people if they cannot really offer alternative solution to the end user to have for the world health care so we must design with the community in mind. If people we are designing for we may design with them and cocreate user centered solution data. Culturally relevant and integrate local languages and local solutions for them. We must build a trust alongside digital platform. And that, they need to be integrated with the public health education and awareness to show the value and reliability on just solutions. We must also make sure that the solutions are affordable, especially during time of crisis. And the cost to access those health solution made available must be very flexible in terms of payment and also make sure that they offer insurance opportunity to the end users on the ground so those are the input I want to bring on board these topics. Bring it back to you João.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you for giving us direct insights on the issues you see and some potential solutions or directions even so thank you once again.
I will now give the word to Houda Chihi online researcher from Tunisia and Ph.D. in telecommunications. I believe he will have slides to share with us so go ahead and share the screen.
>> HOUDA: Thank you so much, can you hear me? Thank you so much João for this great introduction and thank you for the participants for coming to this session. Is this visible? I put it much bigger. Thank you so much. So my today's talk will be about cybersecurity. Let's start with the roadmap of my talk I will start by the context and the challenges to understand more about the interests of this synergy between sustainability and cybersecurity. After that, I will explain more the principle of this synergy together with challenges, best practices and I will sum up my talk about the key interests and key point to that we're offer on my talk so what are the challenges? So today's, nowadays due to rise of, for the problem of climate change we are obliged to exploit the green gas emission. So we look at the ICT for CO2 emission and we speak about any metrics for measuring the energy conceptions.
So let's say that ICT is integrated and it is based in data collection of energy but here we have a threat of attacks, the rise of attacks in energy platforms if there is a lack of cybersecurity tools. So of that is the rise of the use of... we speak nowadays of the revolution of artificial intelligence so we speak about misinformation, tech providers and we have also agreed image of a new generator of artificial intelligence so there is a threat of cybersecurity regarding the climate change we will have and a different outcomes if there is a possibility of intrusion of any energy platforms or any energy algorithms. So this is our, another challenge is the related to data, energy theft which is a risk of companies and sustainability in general. Okay, so let's understand what is a cyber sustainability principle that you will explain in my talk today? So it is the combination between cybersecurity and other principle related to protection of society, environment, and governance now we speak about a new protection of the planet and environment. Which leads, if it is done in efficient way, we speak about sustainability and we in the introduction of cybersecurity we have another principle which is cyber sustainability. So what is a that principle about. It is a combination of different practices of cybersecurity together with carbon footprint minimization and energy conception so in this way we speak about a balance or trade‑off between Sustainable Development Goals, satisfaction which leads to sustainability together with cybersecurity practices. So within in this way we will have an alignment between cybersecurity and green tech. So we will, it is a way of redirection of tech for both cybersecurity, our security of data protection, privacy, human rights protection together with climate protection, environment sustainability. So here we speak about a new concept which is based in protection. Which is based on specific policies to speak about cyber sustainability. We have different pillars to respect in the way to protect the environment together with the data protection our environment rights protection to the way it is based in specific policies and recommendations. It is a redaction for the directed for people protection whether it is related to planet, environment, health, health care, or a human rights in terms of data protection and information protection and tech solution which will be a greed together with respect of cybersecurity which is related to protection of human rights and we speak about the green policies directed or some for a human. So here it is a way of direction for cybersecurity for good, for both sustainability together with human rights protection. A simple practices for energy we can use, for example, internet of things or sound service for energy and monitoring and. The best practice is to offer these sensors in a safe way. Also another recommendation is related to another direction or empowering research labs to focus more in these synergy between sustainability together with a skirt intersection. Here we need a collaboration between different stakeholders and a minor shift together with capacity building in both green green practices and cybersecurity which calls all developers academia, environment and experts, we need all of them to seat at the table and collaborate and the to state specific rules that are reflected for the benefit of the planet and human rights at the same time. So do not waste a lot of time. Let's go to the best practices. And tips for sustainable cybersecurity. It's based in three pairs. It is a specific environment that is possibility. It is a socio ethics. It is a technology resilience. It is the other direction for technology, for both a green practices and together with respect and control or for a specific ethics tool to to protect the human rights and the sustainability at the same time. Okay. Let's speak now more precisely and the impact on artificial intelligence because nowadays machine learning and artificial intelligence are integrated everywhere. Whether in cybersecurity or sustainability but if they are running with different kinds of data, we will have a better outcome, we will have different outcome with the threat of our lives with the threat of the planet. But here it should be the use of artificial intelligence, algorithm should be in a specific quality of datasets together with info we conclude or remark offer any threat or risk of bias or discrimination of specific information or better outcome. We have, we will have to do specific audience and test. And the adding the specific data that we need, that lead us to have the good outcome. So another good practices is based in the concept of the combination between the safety concept, sustainability together with cybersecurity. Which is based in first of all, we need to do to have a simple practices. Such as the data packet to note in case we have any threat or risk we don't have, we don't have a ways of all of data but if we keep them and do the necessary backups and storage, there is now a ways for us. There is no threat of reputation, we will not lose our data on repeat again the collection and ways the data and ‑‑
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Excuse me, we have to move forward.
>> Okay. So another important thing is to have inspiration from great companies and regulators or standards that are dealing with the problem of cybersecurity and convince them to state specific rules together for the benefit of the planet such as in European acts. Okay.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you very much for your ideas. Yes.
>> Huda: Just, I issue
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: I always feel like a bad person so thank you for doing that role. We definitely need it because our time is short. I will now briefly introduce Frederick as well. Be mindful of the time and keep the intervention short. Federico is a data governance aspect with experts in IGF and WSIS so I will give you the word now.
>> FREDERIC COHEN: Hello, everyone, to members and participants. I would like to thank you all for your opportunity to express the consideration and for the organizers. This month is a moment of meeting any exchanges as it was by this voice on the news later with the visit of the underSecretary‑General in France for also the fourth on finance for development. And these IGFs in Norway. The topic of water is a major issue to protect the planet dealing with health and sanitation to the people and in combat pollution everywhere.
Ecology is impacted by the interaction of the human with development and the industrialized population make life in danger. It is a form of openness and inclusivity. That is focused for the international community to assist and support the decision‑making that apply for the global economy. Conservation of population at the calculation is a minor to undermine statistics and manage with a solution. This is a way to present personalities around the world and transmit information about their way of communication. This is is to the price of peace 80 years ago. This event that will may date has been the occasion to remind the work done to advance knowledge for prevention and application of the wide lines exposed with internet. These are an important reference for the discussion. It is supposed that every meeting should be a major road in the community and the engagement of member states. When is the state, our commitment to improving communication for global affairs. As this goes, for the nation, health, education and climate change are reminded for the global market in the investment to develop a fair economy. It is a sector of partnership where participants can be proud to offer their volunteering. The framework is defining an ambitious manner. The future talk we notice the dynamic coalition and the data‑driven health technologies from this contribution to develop forward and it will be an important interest for the followers of these. I thank you very much.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Thank you very much, Frédéric and for gatekeeping the time. I also have some slides on the topic but I am also mindful of the time. I will ask people to leave questions in the chat if you have any and I will share my screen. And I hope you can see the slides as well. Yeah? Perfect. Just a very brief note on something that we are already aware of, environmental hazards, definitely leads to health emergencies. We have reports stating that both air pollution and water contamination just as examples can have obvious implications on health outcomes. And surprisingly this is a data point that I thought it was interesting to share that's 99% of the world's population is living in places where the air quality guidelines are not met the one set by WHO and so this obviously is a burden. It can lead to conditions such as asthma, stroke or cardiovascular diseases such as cancer and for the determination why we may think we already having good results, and we do have 73% of the population having good coverage in a safely and manageable drinking water access, it also means that the other 27% do not have so and this may lead to diseases. It can be many types of gas row infections but also cancers for example contamination in waters.
And I wanted to bring some examples and initiatives that are ongoing that try to focus on these aspects. One is a breeze sew meter that addresses the air quality in realtime.
And many applications that we currently use already consume the information provided by these tools. We can see what are the environments where the air quality is better or worse and we have the project in Bangladesh that provides this to the operation based on the quality of the water they were consuming in public wells and also in open systems. And then the SORMSS project that is manage outbreaks of diseases.
And trying to provide the responses in realtime. And we know that's vulnerability as we saw based on these project does not necessarily mean connectivity. So my one advocacy point in this intervention is for us to address the aspects of internet access, digital literacy and inclusion in design which are often lacking. So equity must be this principle and it's just the afterthoughts of these tools and, therefore, I really do think that we should pick up on some of these projects and leverage them into policy line interventions so that we can replicate what was well done and also learn from the projects that didn't learn so well and try to bridge the gap or at least solve some of the issues that were raised our found in many of these projects that leads to them not continuing over a bigger lifespan than what the funding allocates for.
I would like to invite questions from the audience I know in the room you may have people that have questions. I believe you can raise your hand and a microphone will be provided to you and I am looking to the online chats to see if there are any chats popping up. Please raise your hand before an intervention even if you don't have questions, please share your ideas and comments. Thank you so much
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Do we have some questions in the room? Please show hand? Yes? Please come to the microphone and speak. Please state your name and affiliation when you start.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Marcello and a researcher in public health. Congratulations for the interesting interventions we have here. I'd like to ask you about this, when we link the discussion, make the links between health and environment, we see a new source of data for environmental health reproduces to internet of things. I would like to hear from you why you think about the validity of this data health. Can we reproduce this data, produced by several devices for monitoring environment? And how come we use this data to provide the surveillance in health care scenarios?
>> Amado: Yes that's an important question and I think we have to double‑check on the facility of this data. Nowadays as our colleague mentioned the IoT, specifically dedicated to health care is almost in most of the countries already linked to the public health policies. In what we are realizing is it is not only to take care of the public health problems that are really already available on a basis, already mentioned, but also how can we really help the population to improve their health? That means, if they are having a fitness program. They are trying to compensate chronic diseases, in the environmental variables in order for them to help to improve this. It's important to integrate those kind of values or those kind of information into their personal health record. And provide them with personalized recommendations, personalized guidelines which through the use of AI in those agentic resources I already mentioned to you, I would already be available in certain applications. The most important step to equip right now is how can we define these guidelines in our own environments? Because it is not the same value which is here for some of this beautiful country as it is in Mexico, or in Panama or in another country, in another region, then our recommendation is of course to join the efforts from the World Health Organization and others to have this data regionalized by included into the different platforms.
That are already available from the different regions and that we can provide a personalized recommendation. Thanks.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: You asked about the validity and this depends on the type of data.
So if you have measurements about water qualities and of course if you have a trust laboratory, if you have measurements by IoT devices, often you have to make a lot of assumptions about costs, about measurements that you cannot directly measure but that you can kind of get from direct measurements and then those are based on assumptions and of course they run the risk of including certain errors or even political misconceptions.
>> YAO AMEVI A SOUSOU: I think in terms of trust and the solution I think we need to come up with unified mechanism of where policies so that the data that is collected and how they are collected are done in the same way to be a trust on those data and depending on the regions on the world is is there are different methods use but all in all coming with unified regulations in regard to measures of course to how we collect the data and scientifically proven the validity of those data feeling that it will help build trust in the data and then also we need to be able to replicate those methods and methodologies. Thank you.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Do we have comments from the online speakers on this question?
>> I think Houda has her hand raised.
>> Houda: Thank you so much for this question. I want to add that the source of data collection is a very important. And the next thing is the testing phase is very important too. Because if we deploy any solution or directed for health care an important thing is to test it before and to check the outcome that we can commercialize it, decline it or just adjust it or retrain and collect a new data and this is a collaborative efforts between us. So technical team and medical staff. Thank you.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Thank you, are there any further comments from the experts? Otherwise, are there further questions from the room? Do we have questions online? João?
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: Yes, we have questions online. The question comes from representative of IGF Ghana how can we nurses balance the benefits of AI driven care with the need for human empathy and compassion care. I would say even beyond nurses, health care profession as a whole.
>> June Parris: Can I say a few words it's up to the individual as a health care professional. You should be, you should put your job, you shouldn't be the job first but you should care about the patient and empathize and, you know, know something about what you're talking about. The important thing in health care is to education. We have to have expert patients. So the more expert a patient is, the easier the job is, so everything that we've said today, the environment, health care, internet, natural disasters, it all comes down to one thing, education. And the health care professional in particular that they need to be dedicated to the job and do a good job.
>> YAO AMEVI A SOUSOU: I can add to what you said. Especially the health care professionals. Be the technology available. They need to make sure they create more empathy with the patient. I do my research, I noticed that most of the trust issue came, come from the way they are dealing with the patients and this creates a bridge of trust between them and their patients. So creating empathy with the patient but also integrating themselves in those daily practices.
Quite effective I think so.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Thank you, we have a hand from Houda, would you like to go ahead?
>> Houda Chihi: Yes, I would like to say technology whether based in AI or any other thing that's here to complement, to help us but empathy is always the first thing that we should provide to any patient to the team to accept any medical tool to helping recover very fast. Thank you.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Thank you, do we have a further question? From the room? I don't see any from the room. How do ‑‑
>> YAO AMEVI A SOUSOU: I'm not sure, we don't have any question.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Maybe if, then maybe to answer the last question, studies have shown that people tend to see more empathy in AI than in human doctors. Human doctors are often stressed and under time pressure and sometimes they don't act with the empathy we would like them to act with and of course empathy is not just using the right words. But it is a lot more and with AI, this is limited to the right words right now. And when I look at doctors, I see a lot of doctors that have an issue with this kind of semieducate patients who have used Google or ChatGPT for their problems and question the authority of the doctor.
While not really understanding the issue. At the same time, AI can help to provide further explanation to patients. So when a patient gets a diagnosis and as they have a hard time to understanding what it means, it could be provided to answer further questions that they have maybe after the doctor is gone and they would need further answers which cannot be given by the health system currently easily.
>> JOÃO ROCHA GOMES: I will also add a maybe second point which is the fact that empathy is often therapeutic if we think about diseases. That are incurable. Empathy is the most important part of care. But we can also look at the perspective of these of when is it curable. Should we also spend the time and effort taking into the account that we have limited resources empathizing with the patients or focusing on care. Obviously the answer should be both. Not always that is possible and health care results even though they depend on both above anything else they depend on good rules and good treatments for the patients.
Empathy should always be part of it and as you said technology is easy to leverage those parts of health care. Potentially even a replacement in the future. I would not say that's possible. It's just words, not actions. And people still know that there's not a human behind the machine and that still counts even if indirectly. But I would say that it's say it's still relevant and thank you for the time as well. And certainly you can wrap up very soon.
>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: We have to wrap up. Thank you. And this was already kind of a final comment from you. Thank you for your excellent moderation João, thank you for all that organized this session, thank you for Amali who was not able to come and who is kind of the driving force between this dynamic coalition. Thank you for all the participants here online, thank you for attending. For your interesting question, for your interest, and we, we know, we, technology, internet, AI, data provide a lot of opportunities to improve health care but also they come with a lot of risks that we have to tackle and that we have to see how we can manage them in order to keep the risk low and the benefit high when it comes to health care and environment and how to improve resilience so thanks a lot and we will be here so if you are interested in the topic, please join us again at WSIS in two weeks.
>> Thank you.