Health & Wellness and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence helps us control our bodies and maintain good health and wellness habits. Our Future Trends Forum experts highlighted the following points:

Digital phenotype

In order to apply technology to the area of healthcare, first of all we need to measure what is going on in our body at a specific moment and make sense out of it. AI is driven by the data that our cell phones compile, data on our behavior that AI can then analyze with increased sophistication and detect patterns that would otherwise be missed.
AI presents itself as a tool that supports medical decisions and changes in health habits. Technology allows us to create a ‘digital phenotype’ with data that allows us to understand someone’s behavior and personality and provide advice on how to proceed in specific scenarios.

Telemedicine

So far, telemedicine has been based on doctor-patient communication via phone call or videoconference. But it is the data generated in these remote consultations that can be used by AI and drive changes within the system.

Diagnoses and predictions of wellness

Applied to this area, AI is purely machine learning: extracting from a large data set, developing an algorithm and making recommendations.

That is what Watson, IBM’s cognitive system, is working intensely on. It has come up against the huge technical and human challenges of using AI in clinical practice.

Virtually all healthcare professionals will use AI in the future, but we need to work on the creation and training of algorithms before it can be implemented to directly assist patients.