Your next doctor’s appointment might be with an AI — from technologyreview.com by Douglas Heaven
A new wave of chatbots are replacing physicians and providing frontline medical advice—but are they as good as the real thing?
Excerpt:
The idea is to make seeking advice about a medical condition as simple as Googling your symptoms, but with many more benefits. Unlike self-diagnosis online, these apps lead you through a clinical-grade triage process—they’ll tell you if your symptoms need urgent attention or if you can treat yourself with bed rest and ibuprofen instead. The tech is built on a grab bag of AI techniques: language processing to allow users to describe their symptoms in a casual way, expert systems to mine huge medical databases, machine learning to string together correlations between symptom and condition.
Babylon Health, a London-based digital-first health-care provider, has a mission statement it likes to share in a big, bold font: to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. The best way to do this, says the company’s founder, Ali Parsa, is to stop people from needing to see a doctor.
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Not everyone is happy about all this. For a start, there are safety concerns. Parsa compares what Babylon does with your medical data to what Facebook does with your social activities—amassing information, building links, drawing on what it knows about you to prompt some action. Suggesting you make a new friend won’t kill you if it’s a bad recommendation, but the stakes are a lot higher for a medical app.
Also see:
- AI helps diagnose depression three months earlier than health services by analysing Facebook posts — from independent.co.uk by Alex Matthews-King
‘Depression appears to be quite detectable in this way; it really changes people’s use of social media in a way that something like diabetes doesn’t,’ researchers write