VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The innovation of the ParuKu application by University of Indonesia (UI) students won the People's Choice Award at the international NUS Medical Grand Challenge 2021 organized by the National University of Singapore. ParuKu is an Artificial Intelligence-based chatbot application that helps accompany Indonesian people in making decisions amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The ParuKu application provides several services in the form of information on vaccination schedules and locations, information on the availability of hospital beds for Covid-19 services, as well as laboratory recommendations for Covid-19 diagnostic tests based on the user's location and the capacity of health facilities. The application is a collaborative work of students from the Faculty of Medicine (FK) and the Faculty of Computer Science (Fasilkom) UI.

On one hand, the idea of creating ParuKu innovation started from a phenomenon in the community who is worried about being infected with Covid-19 when visiting hospitals or other health sectors amid ongoing pandemic. On the other hand, people need to queue for a long time to receive health services, so there is a possibility of being infected. ParuKu is expected to be able to reduce the duration of time that must be provided for the administrative process in receiving health services. In addition, this application allows users to visit health facilities at the right time without having to queue for a long time.

Mutiara Auliya Firdausy, a member of the ParuKu Team hopes that this application can be widely used in many areas and can help accelerate the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The ParuKu application is one of the innovative solutions from the 16 participating teams in the 2021 NUS Medical Grand Challenge competition which is judged by a panel of judges who have expert backgrounds from various industries, such as information technology, health care, and engineering. Each team put their proposals into action and their ideas were judged to have an impact on healthcare, innovation, business strategy, marketing and commercialization.