Article By Binoy Anto.
23 May 2021, 6:30pm
Artificial intelligence is by turns terrifying, overhyped, hard to understand and just plain awesome.
For an example of the last, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco were able this year to hook people up to brain monitors and generate natural-sounding synthetic speech out of mere brain activity. The goal is to give people who have lost the ability to speak — because of a stroke, ALS, epilepsy or something else — the power to talk to others just by thinking.
That’s pretty awesome.
Critical Mental Health Programs
One area where AI can most immediately improve our lives may be in the area of mental health. Unlike many illnesses, there’s no simple physical test you can give someone to tell if he or she is suffering from depression.
Primary care physicians can be mediocre at recognising if a patient is depressed, or at predicting who is about to become depressed. Many people contemplate suicide, but it is very hard to tell who is really serious about it. Most people don’t seek treatment until their illness is well advanced.
The Crisis Text Line is a suicide prevention hotline in which people communicate through texting instead of phone calls. Using AI technology, the organisation has analysed more than 100 million texts it has received. The idea is to help counsellors understand who is really in need of emergency care.
You would think that the people most in danger of harming themselves would be the ones who use words like “suicide” or “die” most often. In fact, a person who uses words like “ibuprofen” or “Advil” is 14 times more likely to need emergency services than a person who uses “suicide”. A person who uses the crying face emoticon is 11 times more likely to need an active rescue than a person who uses “suicide”.
On its website, the Crisis Text Line posts the words that people who are seriously considering suicide frequently use in their texts. A lot of them seem to be all-or-nothing words: “never, “everything”, “anymore”, “always”.
Many groups are using AI technology to diagnose and predict depression. For example, after listening to millions of conversations, machines can pick out depressed people based on their speaking patterns.
When people suffering from depression speak, the range and pitch of their voice tends to be lower. There are more pauses, starts and stops between words. People whose voice has a breathy quality are more likely to reattempt suicide. Machines can detect this stuff better than humans.
There are also visual patterns. Depressed people move their heads less often. Their smiles don’t last as long. One research team led by Andrew Reece and Christopher Danforth analysed 43,950 Instagram photos from 166 people and recognised who was depressed with 70% accuracy, which is better than general practice doctors.
There are other ways to make these diagnoses. A company called Mindstrong is trying to measure mental health by how people use their smartphones: how they type and scroll, how frequently they delete characters.
In his book “Deep Medicine”, which is about how AI is changing medicine across all fields, Eric Topol describes a study in which a learning algorithm was given medical records to predict who was likely to attempt suicide. It accurately predicted attempts nearly 80% of the time. By incorporating data of real-world interactions such as laughter and anger, an algorithm in a similar study was able to reach 93% accuracy.
I had a chance to interview Topol last weekend at the Aspen Ideas: Health conference. He emphasised how poor we are at diagnosing disease across specialities and figuring out when to test and how to treat. When you compare a doctor’s diagnosis to an actual cause of death as determined by an autopsy, you find that doctors are wrong a lot of the time. Three-quarters of patients taking one of the top 10 drugs by gross sales do not get the desired or expected benefit.
Medicine is hard because, as AI is teaching us, we’re much more different from one another than we thought. There is no single diet approach that is best for all people because we all process food in our own distinct way. Diet, like other treatments, has to be customised.
You can be freaked out by the privacy-invading power of AI to know you, but only AI can gather the data necessary to do this.
The upshot is that we are entering a world in which people we don’t know will be able to understand the most intimate details of our emotional life by observing the ways we communicate. You can imagine how problematic this could be if the information gets used by employers or the state.
Preventing Accidents
Each year, 1.35 million people die from vehicle-related accidents, and more than half of these victims are “vulnerable road users” (e.g., pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists).
As autonomous vehicles become an increasing presence on roadways, there is growing concern about how everyone will share the road safely. A new app, !important, aims to minimize the risks of accidents with all certified connected vehicles: cars and trucks, buses, autonomous vehicles, construction equipment—even drones.
The AI-enabled app creates a virtual protection zone around pedestrians, wheelchair users, cyclists or motorcyclists using their mobile devices.
The app sends the user’s location coordinates to all nearby automated or connected vehicles, augmenting the vehicles’ sensor input to ensure the individual is recognized and tracked. If a connected vehicle gets too close to an !important user, its brakes will be triggered automatically before a collision can occur.
Health Catalyst has developed catalyst.ai, healthcare.ai and its healthcare analytics platform as potentially life-saving technologies for a wide range of clinical scenarios. For example, its machine-learning capability can identify those patients at greatest risk of readmission and provide clinicians with guidance that enables them to step in and address the problem. The technology has also helped to prevent hospital-acquired infections, predict chronic disease and reduce mortality rates.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many frontline workers around the world have tragically lost their lives to the virus while assisting patients. Bracing for a second wave, the Sheba Medical Center in Israel is testing smart hospital rooms that could save patients’ lives as well as those of doctors and nurses. The Israeli hospital believes that AI-powered robots, virtual reality glasses and early warning systems can all provide better outcomes for Covid-19 patients and a safer environment for those who care for them.
Improving Healthcare Delivery
Healthcare is one of the most important areas where AI is playing a critical role in saving lives. Despite the extensive training physicians and nurses receive, they cannot identify every ailment or medical condition. Furthermore, Covid-19 has certainly shown the challenges that remain in helping large numbers of critically ill patients. Companies are searching for—and finding—solutions thanks to machine learning and AI.
Health Catalyst has developed catalyst.ai, healthcare.ai and its healthcare analytics platform as potentially life-saving technologies for a wide range of clinical scenarios. For example, its machine-learning capability can identify those patients at greatest risk of readmission and provide clinicians with guidance that enables them to step in and address the problem. The technology has also helped to prevent hospital-acquired infections, predict chronic disease and reduce mortality rates.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many frontline workers around the world have tragically lost their lives to the virus while assisting patients. Bracing for a second wave, the Sheba Medical Center in Israel is testing smart hospital rooms that could save patients’ lives as well as those of doctors and nurses. The Israeli hospital believes that AI-powered robots, virtual reality glasses and early warning systems can all provide better outcomes for Covid-19 patients and a safer environment for those who care for them.
Next-generation disaster response is another reason why AI is good
How Artificial Intelligence Can Save Your Life
Suggest and share this article to Social Media..
California saw major devastation in 2017, due to the onslaught of wildfires. More than 1 million acres of land was reported burned in wildfires that also claimed the lives of around 46 people and led to the loss of hundreds of homes. The large-scale wildfires in Australia between 2019 and 2020, also caused severe damage and loss of life.
Due to the increasing threats of extreme weather events like these, more and more government authorities and organizations are embracing artificial intelligence to help fight these disasters with algorithms and satellite data.
AI has ably demonstrated its utility in building smart disaster responses and providing real-time data of disasters and weather events.
This helps save valuable time, enabling disaster response in a more targeted and efficient manner. Once sophisticated enough, it could theoretically offer warnings with enough time to safely evacuate any people in the danger zone.
It is also expected that deep learning will soon be integrated with disaster simulations to come up with useful response strategies.
AI is on-call all the time
While there are some very real concerns about the potential to eliminate or make some types of jobs redundant, AI could also open entirely new areas of work. The application of AI in businesses will also force the job market to evolve which, with the right preparation, could be a very good thing.
From various maintenance and supporting roles, to entirely new careers not yet dreamed of, the widespread adoption of AI could be a brighter future for all of us. And we’ve been here before.
Similar fears to those around AI have surfaced around most new forms of technology. Sometimes, the fears are well-founded, and sometimes not, but either way, the genie of new technology cannot be put back in the bottle. All we can do is learn how to use it wisely and to our advantage.
And that is your lot for today.
While there are some very real concerns around its development, AI could be the best thing since sliced bread if adopted properly.
More Related Articles about AI in Healthcare.
PWC – No longer science fiction, AI and robotics are transforming healthcare – http://bit.do/pwcai
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine – http://bit.do/journalsage
Health IT Analytics – http://bit.do/healthitanalytics
Smart use of artificial intelligence in health care – http://bit.do/deloitteai
