Editor’s note: In addition to following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Living a Lot Longer.”
Over my last few columns, we have been looking at the application of artificial intelligence to communication, relationships and transportation. The impact of artificial intelligence on medicine, because it is likely to extend the length of our lives, may be more important than any of those others.
Historically, there has been a great disparity between living in a major metropolitan area, close to excellent cutting-edge medical centers which contains medical centers of excellence and living in a rural area where there have been few facilities to treat complex medical problems. The differential in available treatment has been significant. However, when artificial intelligence combined with robotics and instantaneous communication come together, the population of rural areas may soon also be able to receive that highly specialized treatment.
There is still the issue of how to amortize expensive equipment over a small rural population, but if this equipment is mobile—and we have many types of automated transportation—this may become less of a problem as well.
Already, hospitals in Boston are calling patients in the Berkshires to let them know that their heart needs to be checked out. One Berkshire friend of mine, who had a heart replacement some time ago, is networked into her doctors in Boston and she gets a call to come in if any irregularity is detected. I know there are doctors at Fairview Hospital who would like to increase the amount of local telemedicine, and this will soon be possible as
the price for communication and remote sensing continues to drop.
Just as we have seen remote learning take off, making excellent teachers more easily accessible, the same will be true for medical specialists. They may soon be able to conduct exams remotely with the assistance of local, less specialized, medical professionals. I have met radiologists who work far away from the hospitals with which they are affiliated without any degradation in their ability to contribute at a high level. At the same time their cost of living and their daily travel time go down. And if the insurance companies would cooperate, this might lower the cost of medical care.
Now, just as all networks can be abused and potentially open to attack, there are security issues that do need to be worked out. While the systems are becoming more secure every year, but the hackers are also becoming more sophisticated and might try to hijack diagnoses and treatments. Still, if you have the choice between security and death, you might be willing to sacrifice a little security.
Just as there is danger when we rely on AI to run driverless cars, airplanes, trucks, ships and trains, some of the same risks will apply to medicine as well. At the moment, though, the upside seems substantially greater than the downside, but of course we never know what may materialize on the horizon.
Not widely recognized is the potential of the smart watch in the future of medicine. Several years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook, when asked about the future of self-driving cars, opined that Apple’s ultimate contribution to society would be medical, not entertainment or informational. I noticed he has since laid off the people from the car team, but not the people on the smart watch team. This is very worth paying attention to. A smart watch will be capable of measuring far more than just bit is blood pressure that is being measured. There is a real possibility of a watch that can noninvasively measure your blood sugar as well. Right now, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensor that can beam near-real-time data to a smartwatch is becoming a cornerstone of daily care for many people with diabetes.
The fact that these devices can also take movies and photographs, record lectures, and be your satellite radio equivalent all at the same time is pretty incredible. When we get to the point where sensors that can receive visual imagery and sounds will be combined with gyroscopes, barometers, accelerometers and magnetometers all in something that weighs a few ounces and fits in your pocket, you’ll have an entire laboratory there, a laboratory that can transmit and share information and process it as well. Each of us will have in our pocket more horsepower than NASA used to get to the moon. It makes the future of remote medicine look positively guaranteed.
