Digital, the new found hope!

Like many others, I was always fascinated by the technology and very optimistic about its effects on humanity. Technology until digital revolution, was very personal. The impacts were felt only by the closed circle, to a person or company benefiting from the product. Digital transformation changed the whole perspective on how you view technology. It is impacting end-to-end ecosystem. It is directly impacting human lives. We still need to address ethical issues on usage of data, biased data, privacy, security etc., and there is concerted effort on that front globally. But the effect of digital is largely positive for the human kind. That’s what enthused me to do research more, unearth use cases, and apply cross functionally.

I wanted to share some of the amazing use cases that is transforming healthcare.

Digital technologies, AI, Machine Learning along with wearable, drones, mobile apps etc. are transforming emergency care.

An AI that listens in on 911 calls in Denmark will diagnose heart attacks from voices and other background sounds better than dispatchers can.
“The patient was gasping for breath because his heart wasn’t beating, and the AI recognized the pattern.” - Fast Company

The recent news about the usage of drone to save drowning surfers in Australia is a great example of outcome based advancements of digital technologies working together.

"I was able to launch it, fly it to the location, and drop the pod all in about one to two minutes. On a normal day that would have taken our lifeguards a few minutes longer to reach the members of the public." - Lifeguard supervisor Jai Sheridan.

Is this not a remarkable achievement considering every micro seconds matter in emergency care?

CheXNet: Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning
A group of researchers in Stanford came out with a model named CheXNet, a 121-layer neural network that inputs a chest X-ray image and outputs the probability of pneumonia along with a heat-map localizing the areas of the image most indicative of pneumonia. As per the research report the model exceeded the average radiologist performance on the pneumonia detection task.

X-rays are one of the largest data-set available, approximately 2 billion procedures per year. Applying digital technologies in association with computing power on such common and vast data-set, we are moving towards predictable care. Similar advancements are seen in diabetic care, Alzheimer disease, organ transplantation, chronic pain managementetc., aided by big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and Internet of Things.

These are all made possible because of the integrating effects of the technology. Humankind was storing data for long, but in silos. One can look at their garage, attics, old hard disks etc. you will know what I am talking about. That is at the individual level. Likewise every institution has tons of data – hospitals, insurance companies, manufactures, educational and research institutions etc.etc. (and most of the data stored for compliance purposes!) We typically call them junk. It all made sense only when we started integrating them with the live data from wearable (IoT), and applied algorithms (AI & ML) leveraging the high performance and exponentially scalable computing capability of the cloud.