Healthcare's digital future
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is medicine about to be transformed by digitisation and artificial intelligence?
Ed Butler has his cognitive abilities assessed by a computer app. Thomas Sawyer of the health tech company Cognetivity, which developed the AI-assisted app claims it will help revolutionise the early detection and treatment of Alzheimer's.
But pretty soon our wellbeing could be monitored by multiple apps - on our phones, in our bathroom scales, even in our toilets - streaming data back to computerised healthcare systems. That's the vision of Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. But he also tells Ed of the many pitfalls that could await us in this data-driven future. Plus Sarah Deeny of The Healthcare Foundation in the UK raises concerns about the sensitivity of some of the data being handled.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Doctor holds a tablet computer showing an X-ray image; Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.4 | Today, the future of healthcare, computers that continuously monitor and assess are vital signs. |
| 0:12.2 | In the morning, you wake up and you step on a scale and that data is digitally connected to your healthcare system. |
| 0:19.3 | And there are AI triggers that say it looks like you've gained |
| 0:23.1 | three pounds in the last week, increase the dose of your water pill. But do we really want tech |
| 0:28.1 | companies knowing our most intimate secrets? Health data often has very private things that people |
| 0:34.9 | want to keep to themselves. So that might be that they've had mental health treatment |
| 0:38.4 | or if they might be concerned, |
| 0:40.4 | that information about whether they're at high risk of heart failure |
| 0:43.5 | might be shared with an insurance company. |
| 0:46.1 | The Future of Healthcare, Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:53.3 | So here we are. I'm looking at the integrated cognitive assessment on a tablet in front of me, a computer tablet, |
| 1:01.7 | and we are typing in some of my basic details. So we've got the year of both. |
| 1:08.3 | There we are. 1967, I'm an old man. |
| 1:11.6 | This is me having my cognitive capacity checked by means of a mobile computer game. |
| 1:17.8 | Images flash in front of me, and as fast as I can, |
| 1:20.9 | I've got to indicate with my thumbs if I've seen an animal or a picture of something else. |
| 1:25.8 | That might have been an animal, I think. |
| 1:27.7 | Yeah, that was. |
| 1:29.3 | Ooh, yeah, that was a bird. |
| 1:30.6 | This is surprisingly fun. |
| 1:32.6 | Nothing there, I don't think. |
... |
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