FACSA and ITI will apply artificial intelligence to predict Covid-19 cases based on wastewater analysis

• The Gimeno Group company is leading the project COVID WATERfocused on detecting the presence of genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater
• The project, which ITI is now joining, is funded by the Valencian Innovation Agency and has collaborators such as IATA-CSIC, CEBAS-CSIC, the University Institute of Pesticides in Water at the Universitat Jaume I and IoTsens

FACSA, a company of Grupo Gimeno specializing in the integral water cycle, and ITI, a technology center specializing in ICT, have signed a collaboration within the framework of the project “COVID WATER: The role of wastewater in the detection of Covid-19: evolution of the pandemic and role in the preventive control of future outbreaks”, financed by the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI).

This highlights the potential of wastewater to provide epidemiological information, in the line of research known as Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE), and has been carried out since the end of March 2020, months during which extensive sampling has been carried out in different municipalities of the Valencian Community such as Castelló, Alcoy, Burriana, Peñíscola and Buñol-Alborache.

The project's objective is to create a multidisciplinary working group that will allow conclusions to be drawn from the data obtained to date in these samples, thereby improving the monitoring of the current COVID-19 epidemic, by including the anticipation of new outbreaks and spikes in the study locations.

This is where ITI's specialized knowledge comes into play, applying Data Analytics and Machine Learning techniques with enabling technologies like Big Data to develop solutions for the early detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater treatment plants. These solutions detect anomalies in epidemiological indicators based on modeling their normal behavior and their affinity with existing epidemiological models. They also predict future values ​​or trend changes in epidemiological indicators using their historical data and combining it with other explanatory variables, such as socioeconomic and environmental factors.

The results obtained will be integrated into the COVID WATER tool developed by FACSA, which intelligently interprets the various data collected to date, ranging from the levels of presence of genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in water to the data available at the level of the Valencian Community in relation to the PCR monitoring carried out in the study populations; but also important demographic, socioeconomic and environmental variables.

With all this, the incorporation of applied Artificial Intelligence and Big Data solutions will make it possible to find trends and patterns of behavior among a large number of variables and external factors, thus facilitating the construction of an alert system based on wastewater epidemiology concepts.