1.0
– Introduction to Health 4.0
Future
Scenario: By 2040, a space-based global artificial
intelligence (AI) network of satellites will be put in place that
will monitor and help provide healthcare to people on Earth and in
colonies across our solar system on the Moon, Mars, and other
locations. The system will be linked to massive global health data
warehouses storing data from a wide range of health IT systems,
e.g. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, Personal Health
Records (PHR), Health Information Exchange (HIE) networks,
wearable fitness trackers, implantable medical devices, clinical
imaging systems, genomic databases and biorepositories, surgical
robots, health research knowledgebases and more.
The
space-based global AI system will monitor and analyze the health
data gathered on all humans in real-time, detecting potential
individual and public health issues. The global AI system will
detect problems, diagnose them, send alerts to patients and their
healthcare providers, and recommend treatment plans to resolve the
healthcare issue. The system will also be interfaced to
pharmacies, laboratories, health insurers, public health agencies,
and other institutions as needed. The system will also be able to
monitor a patient's progress, as well as adherence to recommended
treatment plans. It will also seek to anticipate potential
healthcare issues and provide preventive health and predictive
health information tailored to each human. |
Evolution
of Health IT Systems
The
following is a brief overview of the evolution and use of health
information technology in the US since the late 1960's:
-
Health
1.0 (1970's
– 1990)
=
Modular
Health IT Systems, e.g. Patient Registration, Billing, Pharmacy,
Lab…
-
Health
2.0 (1990's
– 2010)
=
Integrated
Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems + Personal Health Records
(PHR) + Clinical Imaging
-
Health
3.0 (2015
– 2030)
=
Networked
EHR Systems + Genomic Information + Wearable & Implantable
Sensor Data
-
Health
4.0 (2030
– 2040's)
=
Global
Networked EHR Systems
+ Artificial
Intelligence
+ Convergence
of
all Technologies Above + Real-Time Global
Data
Collection & Analysis
As
we approach 2020, we
are currently in
the process of developing, and implementing Health
3.0 technologies
and solutions in
the US and other advanced nations across the globe. Preliminary
design and pilot testing of some
Health
4.0 solutions is
just beginning.
Looking
at
2040 and Beyond
Looking
ahead to when Health 4.0 systems will finally
start
rolling into place, keep
in mind
some of the following
predictions
for Healthcare and Health IT systems by
2050.
See
Health
2020-2050.
-
By
2050 we will see more instances of global pandemics and the spread
of deadly diseases as
a by-product of the skyrocketing growth
and migration of the global
population.
-
Rise
of 'Regenerative Medicine', Genetic Engineering, Stem Cell Research,
and the development of 'Human Augmentation' technologies will
dramatically alter people's life spans and capabilities.
-
Use
of biorepositories and genomic information systems will further
transform healthcare and help lower costs.
-
Emergence
of future
knowledge
driven global
health platform and solutions will
be based
on 'open' standards and technologies.
2.0
– Building a Global Artificial Intelligence Platform for Health 4.0
Futurist
Ray Kurzweil has predicted that computers will be as smart as humans
by 2030. By 2045, he claims 'artificial intelligence' systems may be
a billion times more powerful than our unaided 'human intelligence'.
Are you prepared for what this means?
| In
computer science, an ideal Artificial
intelligence
(AI)
system is designed to mimic
cognitive
functions
that humans associate with other human minds, such as “analyzing”,
"learning" and "problem solving". Cognitive
computers are self-learning artificial
intelligence (AI) systems
that can find patterns in massive
collections
of unstructured data and turn it into a presentable form for many
others
to use.
For
more detail, see Wikipedia. |
The
promise of Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
has always been just
beyond
the horizon, not
quite realistic yet still visible to our
imagination through
movies and literature. At
its
inception, AI was
initially deployed
for highly selective defense
or space exploration applications. However,
over time it has steadily advanced and has begun to be utilized in
many other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing.
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Data-Driven Medicine
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and data-driven
medicine are
the next frontier
in the healthcare
revolution. Electronic
Health Record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted by all major
healthcare institutions across the US over the past decade. Now
state and local Health Information Exchanges (HIE) networks are being
deployed to allow access to data in the EHR systems by healthcare
providers
whenever or wherever it's
needed.
In
the meantime, consumers
have been
gradually starting to use Personal Health Record (PHR) systems that
contain their patient data from the
various EHR systems of
healthcare institutions where they have been treated. Now we are
seeing the growing use
of other healthcare technologies that are also gathering
and generating even
more personal health data,
e.g. wearable and
implantable devices, genomic information
systems and
biorepositories, clinical imaging systems, and more.
It
turns out that Medical
data is the
essential part of today's
comprehensive
healthcare systems.
However, processing and
analyzing the massive
quantity of data now being generated by the wide range of
converging health information technologies is almost too much to
handle. It is an area the healthcare industry is struggling to come
to grips with as it turns more and more to use of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) as the means to gain control of the growing
mountain of health related data.
| Roughly
every three years, the amount of medical data on the planet
doubles in size. By 2020, it is expected to double every 73 days. |
It
is time to begin focusing more proactively on the design and
development of a 'global healthcare platform for 2040' built on
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare
Analysts
predict a tenfold growth of the use of artificial intelligence in
healthcare in the next five years, for everything from cancer
diagnosis to diet tips. According to Frost and Sullivan, healthcare
providers will spend $6 billion per year on artificial intelligence
tools by 2021. Google, IBM and Microsoft are all investing heavily in
healthcare and analysts predict 30 percent of providers will run
cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018.
See
Artificial
Intelligence:
There's Still Hope for the Human Race
Early
types of these type of
cognitive systems built
on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have
already started
entering the market.
These include
'smart'
triage systems
that
check
patients’ symptoms against massive
health data
warehouses, then
advise
patients and providers what
they should do next. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems
are also
being used to help consumers
when buying
health insurance, to
monitor biometric data from personal fitness trackers, analyzing
genomic data to predict and potential life-threatening diseases, and
much more.
Artificial
Intelligence
(AI)
is advancing rapidly and is in the process of transforming the face
of healthcare.
Just
a few of
the many
areas in which
AI is being used to affect practice management and healthcare
services include
Diagnosis
and Treatment,
Disease
Management, Personal
Health & Wellness,
Utilization
Management & Reimbursement. Read
5
Ways AI is Changing Healthcare.
Other
areas where AI
technology and
data-driven systems can
be designed, developed, and used to improve healthcare include:
-
Examining
and analyzing genomic
data on
hundreds of millions
of patients.
-
Building
systems that gradually
teach themselves
to become more accurate in its diagnosis.
-
Improving
the speed and accuracy of diagnosis for genetic diseases.
-
Unlocking
the possibility of personalized preventive
and medical treatment
plans.
-
Regularly
monitor patients’ biometric data to see they are complying
with
their treatment plans.
-
Helping
healthcare providers
deliver better
low-cost,
evidence-driven care to
consumers.
-
Helping
consumers to
avoid costly visits to
doctor offices and hospitals.
-
Giving
everyone in the world
the equivalent of a
doctor in their pocket – or
smartphone.
Future
Scenario: By 2040, a space-based global artificial
intelligence (AI) network of satellites will be in place that will
monitor and help provide healthcare to people on Earth and in
colonies across our solar system, e.g. Moon, Mars. The system will be linked to massive global health data
warehouses storing data from a wide range of health IT systems, e.g. EHR, PHR, HIE, IoT devices...
The global AI system will monitor and analyze the health
data gathered on all humans in real-time, detecting potential
individual and public health issues. The system will
detect problems, diagnose them, send alerts to patients and their
healthcare providers, diagnose the problems and recommend
treatment plans to resolve the healthcare issue. The system will
also be interfaced to pharmacies, laboratories, health insurers,
public health agencies, and other institutions as needed. |
Current
News & Activities
The
following are a few selected articles you might want to read to get a
better handle on the latest news about current activities related to
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare:
Selected
Issues
The
following are some of the key issues that need to be addressed as we
continue moving forward with the design, development, and use of AI
technologies and data-drive healthcare information systems:
-
Ethics
-
This emerging issue is concerned
with the moral behavior being programmed by humans into robots and
other 'smart' machines, i.e. Roboethics.
-
Privacy
& Security – This is
always a key issue. When AI systems are turned loose to monitor all
health information systems gathering data on all facets of your
personal health, concerns about who has access to the data and who
it is being shared with are just a few of the issues that must be
adequately addressed upfront.
-
Jobs
- The
Bank of England has predicted
that
intelligent machines might take over 80 million American and 15
million British jobs, respectively over the next 10 to 20 years. The
healthcare industry will not be immune to this change.
-
Legal
Issues - One
of the most important points of interest that needs to be hammered
out first is the legality of these machines. When a doctor's gross
negligence leads to a misdiagnoses and patient harm, the fault is
placed squarely on the shoulders of the offending physician. But
what happens when a similar situation befalls an AI system? If such
a program were to misdiagnose a patient, who's to blame?
- Open
Source
- Many new 'open source' tools are arriving that can now run on
affordable hardware and allow individuals and small organizations to
perform prodigious data crunching and predictive tasks.
Read
about H2O,
OpenAI,
and
other machine learning and AI tools being used in healthcare at
Open
Health News.
Check out the growing List
of AI Projects on Wikipedia.
| Regenstrief
Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics &
Computing, recently examined open source algorithms and machine
learning tools in public health reporting: The tools bested human
reviewers in detecting cancer using pathology reports and did so
faster than people. Indeed, more and more healthcare systems on
the cutting edge are looking at ways to harness the power of AI,
cognitive computing and machine learning. See Artificial
intelligence and
cognitive
computing - Healthcare IT News |
Recommended
Next Steps
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) systems today can learn in ways society once
thought impossible, which has major implications for multiple
industries –
especially the healthcare industry. It
is now
time
to begin focusing more proactively on a
public-private sector collaboration to
design and develop a 'global healthcare platform for 2040' built on
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Many
countries are beginning to support the idea of having a global
healthcare network of data centers coupled with a state-of-the-art AI
technology platform that will allow sort through all the data,
standardize it, and put it into a form that is useful and easily
understood by patients, healthcare providers, healthcare insurers,
researchers, and other individuals and organizations.
Any
such global effort should keep in mind the key management strategies
for success in the 21st
century – Collaboration, Open Solutions, and continuous Innovation
(COSI). Building such a
global solution will require a massive global public-private sector
partnership. Think of all the
components that will need to converge to compose such a global
solution – e.g. healthcare technologies, research, knowledge,
organizations, and more.
One
final note, advances in AI and technology are helping create a
futuristic human-to-machine and machine-to-human interaction that can
best be described as an 'Invisible' User Interface (IUI) of
the future that simply works non-stop in the background to monitor
and improve health for everyone. It will just be there – serving
mankind.
Recommended
Links
Companies
Systems
& Projects
News
Sites
|
Associations
Journals
|
3.0
- Invisible
User Interface (IUI)
for
Health 4.0
The
Invisible User Interface (IUI) will be a key characteristic of next
generation Health
4.0
systems.
The
emerging Invisible
User Interface (IUI),
also referred to as the Natural
User
Interface
(NUI),
involves
a major paradigm
shift in man machine interaction using
a computer
interface
that will
be
basically
invisible. Most
computer interfaces today
use
artificial controls
and
tangible
devices
whose operation has to be learned, e.g.
Windows, computer mouse, joystick.
That's
about to change big time with
the convergence of multiple modern technologies.
See
Wikipedia.
The
Invisible
User
Interface
(IUI)
will
include
sound, touch, gesture, and
tactile
inputs and outputs as
humans interact
with an
ever increasing numbers of
'smart'
machines
all
around us,
i.e.
Internet of Things (IoT).
The goal for system developers is to now make
ubiquitous computing technology ever more simple to use – designing
systems to seemingly be more intuitive and accessible for use by
humans with minimal technical knowledge and expertise.
Health 4.0 -
Imagine a next generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) system
linked to a
massive global
health data warehouse storing data from a wide range of health IT
systems, e.g. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, Personal
Health Records (PHR), Health Information Exchange (HIE) networks,
wearable fitness trackers, implantable medical devices, clinical
imaging systems, genomic databases and bio-repositories, health
research knowledgebases, medical
sensors and
more.
Health
4.0 Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems of the future will
constantly monitor
and analyze the health data gathered on humans in real-time,
quietly detecting
potential individual and public health issues in
the background. It
will detect problems
and diagnose them,
send alerts to patients and their healthcare providers, and
generate treatment plans to resolve any
healthcare issues.
The system will also be interfaced to pharmacies, laboratories,
health insurers, public health agencies, and other institutions as
needed. The key is
that most of this activity will be done quietly in the background.
Health
4.0 systems will use a variety of emerging technologies that will
allow an
infrastructure of intelligent sensors embedded in our living
and working environment
to
unobtrusively
monitor your personal health data and then interact with you, your
family, healthcare provider, and other concerned parties using a
range advanced verbal and non-verbal communication technologies –
think
Amazon Echo or Apple's Siri personal assistants. |
Invisible
User Interface (IUI)
Today's
computers
can hear, see, read and understand humans better than ever before.
Using
advanced
ambient
intelligence devices embedded
in the environment where we live and work, these emerging
technologies will be able to monitor our
movements, voice, glances, and even thoughts – causing
these
systems to respond and
meet
our
needs in a variety of ways.
These
technologies are
opening a world of opportunities for
AI-powered
systems
to interact and serve us using next
generation Invisible User Interfaces
(IUI).
Think
about it! Our
words and natural
gestures will
trigger interactions with
computer systems and
the
Internet of Things (IoT) all around us,
just
as
if we
were
communicating to another person. Essentially,
we'll
be
doing away with old-fashioned 'screens',
today's
graphical user interface (GUI), and the
ever growing number of mobile
apps.
Building
the Invisible User Interface (IUI) is a
new way of approaching the user experience that thinks beyond the
screen. The goal is to
design systems to
better fit
within our
lives, rather than forcing us
to adapt to the machines
we use. Key features of
the IUI and future
systems include:
-
Anticipatory
design of
new products and
experiences that use constantly
available, real-time data
to anticipate what customers need
and want to do next.
-
Personalization
is the
way that companies can better
connect
and
interact with
their customers,
giving
them the
information they need in a way that feels more
'human'.
-
Ambient
communication
involving
an
infrastructure of intelligent sensors that
will be embedded
in our living
and working environment
– including
wearable and implantable systems.
-
Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
will be needed to monitor, analyze, and take action based on the
wide array of data being collected on each person.
-
'Deep
learning'
is
the
process of
teaching
computers
to
understand and solve a problem by itself, rather than having
engineers code each
and every
solution.
Examples
of Systems using
Invisible User
Interfaces
(IUI)
The
following are some
current examples
of emerging
next
generation apps
and
interfaces to tomorrow's information systems. What makes them special
is that they use
a non-traditional
invisible or
conversational user
interfaces
as their
means of interaction with
humans
-
Read
'No
UI'
Is The New UI.
-
Amazon
Echo – Voice
interaction device
capable of accepting
commands and providing a wide range of information
to
you upon request.
It can
also
control
smart
devices in your home.
-
Braingate
- Creating
and testing
transformative
neurotechnologies
to
restore communication, mobility, and independence of people with
neurologic disease, injury, or limb loss.
-
-
FitBit
– Creating wearable fitness and health tracking devices for
individuals.
-
Magic
– This
company provides access to a 'smart' personal assistant set of
services to meet a range of customer needs.
-
'M'
by
Facebook - A
personal assistant powered
by artificial intelligence (AI) that’s
integrated with Messenger to
help complete
tasks and find information on your behalf.
-
TIII
Project
– Collaborative
research
project focus on developing
tangible, intuitive, interactive interfaces (TIII) for
the future.
-
Wii
– Uses
a
handheld pointing device for
interacting with the Wii computerized game system that
detects movement in three dimensions.
Conclusions
and Next Steps
How
people communicate with each other is very different from how people
interact with machines. The
trend
in computer systems design now
involves
looking
more closely
at
how
humans
interact
and communicate
intuitively. The
goal is to
teach computers,
machines,
and
the Internet of Things (IoT)
to better
comprehend and communicate with humans.
| ‘The
most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are
indistinguishable from it.’ That’s what computer scientist
Mark Weiser wrote in his famous article The
Computer for the 21st Century, originally published in 1991. |
In
the relatively near future, we will be interacting with computers all
around us without noticing them. This ties in closely with the
Invisible User Interface (IUI) and the rapid growth of the Internet
of Things (IoT), which includes wearable, implantable, and
embedded health sensors.
Collaboration,
Coherence, and Convergence will be the key to industry efforts to
challenge the current generation of health IT and healthcare delivery
systems. Efforts are already underway to design and build the next
generation healthcare systems – Read Global
Health 4.0
for 2040 and Beyond
Other
Selected Links
-
NUIGroup.com
– Largest
online
'open
source'
community related to Natural User Interfaces.
-
-
Zero
UI - Guide to designing Invisible User Interfaces (UIU).
- IBM Watson Health - YouTube video by IBM on next generation Healthcare.
- The Body Episode 1 - YouTube video by Dr. Michio Kaku on Medicine in 2050.
|
Conclusion - Global
collaboration, 'open' solutions,
and convergence of the many innovative
technologies
currently under development are key for plans to build and deploy
Health 4.0 by 2040.
* Send us your suggestions and ideas on the development of Health 4.0
