May 12, 2020
Posted by Billy Rutledge, Director of the Coral team
Recently, we’ve seen communities respond to the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic by using technology in new ways to effect positive change. It’s increasingly important that our systems are able to adapt to new contexts, handle disruptions, and remain efficient.
At Coral, we believe intelligence at the edge is a key ingredient towards building a more resilient future. By making the latest machine learning tools easy-to-use and accessible, innovators can collaborate to create solutions that are most needed in their communities. Developers are already using Coral to build solutions that can understand and react in real-time, while maintaining privacy for everyone present.
As mandatory isolation measures begin to relax, compliance with safe social distancing protocol has become a topic of primary concern for experts across the globe. Businesses and individuals have been stepping up to find ways to use technology to help reduce the risk and spread. Many efforts are employing the benefits of edge AI—here are a few early stage examples that have inspired us.
In Belgium, engineers at Edgise recently used Coral to develop an occupancy monitor to aid businesses in managing capacity. With the privacy preserving properties of edge AI, businesses can anonymously count how many customers enter and exit a space, signaling when the area is too full.
A research group at the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in India are using Coral to develop a wearable device to serve as a COVID-19 cough counter and health monitor, allowing medical professionals to better care for low risk patients in an outpatient capacity. Coral's Edge TPU enables biometric data to be processed efficiently, without draining the limited power resources available in wearable devices.
All across the US, hospitals are seeking solutions to ensure adherence to hygiene policy amongst hospital staff. In one example, a device incorporates the compact, affordable and offline benefits of the Coral modules to aid in handwashing practices at numerous stations throughout a facility.
And around the world, members of the PyImageSearch community are exploring how to train a COVID-19: Face Mask Detector model using TensorFlow that can be used to identify whether people are wearing a mask. Open source frameworks can empower anyone to develop solutions, and with Coral components we can help bring those benefits to everyone.
In an effort to rally greater community involvement, Coral has joined The United Nations Development Programme and Hackster.io, as a sponsor of the COVID-19 Detect and Protect Challenge. The initiative calls on developers to build affordable and reproducible solutions that support response efforts in developing countries. All ideas are welcome—whether they use ML or not—and we encourage you to participate.
To make edge ML capabilities even easier to integrate, we’re also announcing a price reduction for the Coral products widely used for experimentation and prototyping. Our Dev Board will now be offered at $129.99, the USB Accelerator at $59.99, the Camera Module at $19.99, and the Enviro Board at $14.99. Additionally, we are introducing the USB Accelerator into 10 new markets: Ghana, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Israel, and Vietnam. For more details, visit Coral.ai/products.
We’re excited to see the solutions developers will bring forward with Coral. And as always, please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
