The Dhaka Times Desk Now a technology has been discovered that will help to prevent suicide through remote controlled technology!
This is one of the many success stories of Tree Hole Rescue Team members. Li Fan, a 21-year-old Chinese student, attempted suicide by posting a detailed message on the country's Twitter-like platform Weibo. It was the day after Valentine's Day.
She wrote that 'I can't take it anymore, I'm giving up everything.' After a while he lost consciousness. Basically he was in debt. He was at loggerheads with his mother and was suffering from severe depression. The Chinese student's post was detected by a program running on a computer in Amsterdam, about 8,000 kilometers from his university in Nanjing.
The computer program specifically identified the message and brought it to the attention of volunteers in various parts of China so that they could take necessary action. When they were unable to wake him up by writing so far away, they raised their concerns with the local police, who then came and rescued him. It may sound strange or extraordinary, but this is one of the many success stories of the members of the Tree Hole Rescue Team.
The head of the initiative is Huang Zhisheng, a top artificial intelligence researcher at the Free University Amsterdam. Over the past 18 months, 600 volunteers across China have been using his program, who say they have already saved nearly 700 lives.
"If you hesitate for even a second, many lives will be lost," Mr. Huang told BBC News. We are able to save about 10 lives every week.'
The first rescue operation was conducted on April 29, 2018. Another 22-year-old girl from China's northern Shandong province is Tao Yeo. He wrote on Weibo that he planned to kill himself two days later. A man named Peng Ling, a volunteer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and several others expressed dismay at this.
In this regard, Miss Peng told the media, 'They got the phone number of a friend of the student from a previous post and reported the matter to the college authorities. I also try to text him before bed, telling him I can pick him up. He also added me as a friend in his wechat message group and gradually he calmed down. From then on I used to keep an eye on him to see if he was eating properly or not. We used to buy her a bunch of flowers online once a week.' After this success, members of the rescue team rescued a man who tried to jump off a bridge. Saves a woman who wanted to commit suicide after being sexually assaulted.
Li Hong, a psychologist from Beijing who has been involved with the program for a year. He says that 'Salvation requires both luck and experience. All the hotel receptionists said they knew nothing about the woman. But one of them hesitated for a moment. We then assumed that this must be the hotel - indeed it was.' He recalls how he and his colleagues visited eight hotels in Chengdu, booking a room to find a woman who had attempted suicide.
How the technology works
Apparently, this Java-based program monitors some 'tree holes' on Weibo. Analyze some of the messages posted there. A 'tree hole' is a Chinese name for places on the internet where people secretly post for others to read. The name is based on an Irish story - where a man tells his secrets to a tree. A post by Joe Phan is an example of this. The 23-year-old Chinese student wrote a message on Weibo before committing suicide in 2012. After his death, more than 10,000 other users commented on the post, voicing their own problems. Thus the original message takes the form of a tree hole at a time.
Any such post detected by this program is automatically given a rank between 1 and 10. If the rank is nine or 9, it should be understood that suicide will be attempted soon. A ranking of 10 or 10 means that this process has already started. In such cases, volunteers report directly to the police, as well as contact the person's family, relatives or friends. But if it's below a ranking of six—meaning only negative speech is detected—the volunteers usually don't intervene. One of the issues in these cases is the attitude of older relatives towards depression, that it is essentially 'no big deal'.
Mr Lee also told the media, 'I know when I was in high school, I also had problems with depression. But my mother told me it was 'absolutely impossible—you'll never think about it again.' A young woman's post was identified in this program as well. In which he wrote that, 'When the new year comes - I will kill myself.' But when the volunteers contacted her mother, she said, 'My daughter is very happy and well at the moment. How dare you say that he is planning to kill himself?' Even after the volunteers presented evidence of her daughter's depression, her mother did not take the matter seriously. Source: BBC
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