Robotics Archives - InnoHEALTH magazine

‘MITRA’-the robot becomes a friend for covid-19 patients at noida hospital

InnoHEALTH magazine digital team — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:16:27 +0000

Invento Robotics, Bengaluru-based start-up has designed and developed Mitra, the robot which has been installed at the entrance of Yatharth Hospital in Noida. The robot helps the Covid-19 patients speak to their near and dear ones, their families and friends alongwith counselling the patients to smoothly overcome the tough times of covid by keeping their anxiety levels under control. The robot also aids in the initial process of checking the symptoms of incoming patients. It asks the patients about their symptoms and screens their temperature. When the relevant statistics are normal then the robot prints an entry pass for the hospital visitor mentioning the result of screening, name and picture of the visitor.

The robot keeps patrolling the wards throughout the day. Since most of the covid hospitals don’t allow phones inside the ICU, a friend like Mitra is surely to come in handy as it can also make video calls and connect patients with their families. A tablet is attached to its chest which allows the patients to see their relatives and medical staff who cannot access the covid wards.

There is facial recognition technology equipped in it that helps the user to recall the ones with whom they had interacted earlier. Psychiatric consultations too happen via the screen on the robot through which the doctor interacts with the patients replying to all their queries. Mitra is also being used to carry out remote consultations with specialists at the hospital to reduce the risk of contracting the infection.

The hospital has procured two Mitra robots at a cost of INR 10 lacs each, one is installed at Yatharth Hospital, Noida and the other one is installed at the hospital’s non-covid branches in sector 110, Noida and sector Omicron 1, Greater Noida to screen patients for influenza like illnesses wherein it screens nearly 500 OPD patients and relatives of IPD patients on a daily basis.

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Hackers Target Patients' Sensitive Health Data

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 10:53:06 +0000

With more and more hospitals and health care facilities moving their infrastructure to Cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) environment including India, hackers find patients’ sensitive health data their next big bet to make quick money. Is there a way out?

In May 2017 when WannaCry ransomware cyber attack took down hospitals across the United Kingdom, causing them to lose access to patient sensitive health data, the world took notice. Hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients in large numbers, including those suffering from serious ailments during the cyber attack.

In the last two years, the growing breed of hackers has brought to the fore a seemingly worrisome possibility: What if critical patient data is hacked and healthcare providers are asked to “pay to get a life back” because ransomware can attack life-supporting medical devices?

The threat is real, especially at a time when health care facilities the world over, including in India, are installing Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices to make sense of critical health data. Billed as the Internet of Medical Things, this network is made up of smart, connected devices that automatically collect, process, and digitally relay information from the physical world through a shared network infrastructure.

When it comes to India, technological advancements are redefining products and enabling customization of services in the healthcare industry across the spectrum. Not just private hospitals but government health care facilities in India are now exploring how to leverage New- Age technologies like Robotics, Blockchain, 3D printing and artificial intelligence.

In such a scenario, Indian hospital needs more attention and preparedness for handling cyber threats like ransomware and malware attacks that may compromise sensitive patients’ data as is happening all over the world. According to global cyber security firm Check Point’s 2019 Security Report, networked medical devices give healthcare professionals the ability to be much more accurate with their treatment regimens, far more efficient in administering care, and way quicker collecting and responding to biomedical information.

With hospitals adopting New-Age technologies to make sense of patients’ data for quick analysis and charting out the future course of treatment, it becomes critical to safeguard the patients’ data.

Ransomware today accounts for 85 per cent of the malware in the healthcare industry. As the IoT ecosystem expands, so does the attack surface for cyber criminals.

In other words, the more hospitals rely on connected technology in our day-to-day lives, the more vulnerable these become to the cyber threats that are increasingly tailored to exploit vulnerabilities and security design flaws in IoT devices at healthcare facilities.

In a recent blog post, Salwa Rafee, IBM Security Industry Leader (Public Sector) says that new cybersecurity threats are emerging in healthcare almost daily.

“Today, hackers target medical and IoT devices that provide, transmit, and access confidential data because they can exploit the fact that most manufacturers did not consider cybersecurity when designing those devices,” she writes.

All of this increases vulnerability to ransomware. Many healthcare providers are forced into paying to get their data back.

Attackers are getting more sophisticated, organized and less obvious as they attempt to snare staff and administrators with rapidly changing tools.

Therefore, security training and guidance is critical to minimize staff exposure to phishing attacks and malware intrusion, as is reasserting policy and penalties for staff with bad intentions.

Tech giant Microsoft which aims to transform the healthcare sector through effective use of analytics- driven insights decoding the complex data available, is very seriously looking at securing the data.

For David Houlding, Principal Healthcare Programme Manager, Industry Experiences at Microsoft, healthcare is drowning in data. “Every patient brings a record that could span decades, with x-rays, MRIs, and other data that can affect every decision. Providers and payers bring their own collateral to the table. Skills, policies, and certifications are just the start,” he said in a blog post recently.

Global cyber security leader Sophos has also found that the healthcare industry in India is the most vulnerable and weak while implementing cyber security solutions for protecting IT infrastructure.

“The ‘State of Endpoint Security’ in Indian hospital needs more attention and preparedness for handling cyber threats like ransomware and malware attacks,” emphasizes Sunil Sharma, Managing Director Sales at Sophos India and SAARC, adding that more and more advanced cyber threat actors are turning their attention to attacks against the healthcare sector.

The attacks are growing exponentially across the world. In July last year, the personal health data of 1.5 million people, almost a quarter of the Singapore’s population, including the details of the city-state’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, was hacked. The hackers broke into the government health database in a deliberate, targeted and well-planned attack. The hack compromised patients’ names, identity card (NRIC) number, address, gender, race and dates of birth.

Following the hack, SingHealth temporarily banned staff from accessing the Internet on all 28,000 of its work computers. According to IBM’s Rafee, finding the right security staff also poses many challenges to a healthcare organization. “Security is a competitive field and attracting the right talent with limited resources has proven to be difficult. Expanding your applicant pool to people with more diverse backgrounds is effective,” she advises.

Not just Singapore, Hong Kong’s Department of Health became the next big victim of a cyber attack after its computers were hit by ransomware which left data inaccessible. In the meantime, the fifth annual Healthcare Breach Report published by Bitglass has found that total number of records exposed in the healthcare sector globally rose to 11.5 million in 2018. On average, nearly 40,000 people were affected per breach, which is more than double the average number affected in 2017.

Is there any full-proof remedy against such malicious activities?

Sophos says that healthcare business needs to move from traditional security software like antivirus and deploy sophisticated security solutions. “Given the speed at which IT threats are evolving and becoming more persistent and coordinated, it is a deep concern to see the adoption of the next- generation predictive technologies. While we all do our best to assure the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data, the methods we use leave us with a staggering number of false positives and logs to manage.

“It is important for organizations to keep up in this dynamic world of IT threats. Organizations need effective anti-ransomware, anti-exploit, and deep learning technology to stay secure,” Sharma emphasizes. Transparency is key. Reporting details of a breach to the public quickly and efficiently is now a requirement. “No organization wants the perception that they don’t disclose information that should be reported timely. I believe the public, and your patients, understand the risk that any organization is likely to be hacked or attacked at some level,” says Rafee.

Healthcare firms have made progress in bolstering their security and reducing the number of breaches over the last few years. “However, the growth in hacking and IT incidents does deserve special attention. As such, healthcare organizations must employ the appropriate technologies and cybersecurity best practices if they want to secure the patient data within their IT systems,” said Rich Campagna, CMO of Bitglass. As you read this, an unauthorized user accessed a “limited number” of employee email accounts at UConn Health (branch of the University of Connecticut), compromising personal data of more than 326,000 patients.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reported that organisations paid out more than $28 million in settlement fees in 2018 – an all-time high in healthcare breach enforcement activity. “In October, the US health insurance provider agreed to pay a whopping $16 million and introduce “substantial corrective action” following a series of cyber-attacks that led to the largest US health data breach in history,” said HHS. The Cloud environment has changed the way companies manage, store and share their data, applications and workloads. Along with a wide range of benefits, though, the Cloud infrastructure also introduces a new, fertile and attractive environment for attackers who crave the enormous amount of available computing resources and sensitive data it holds.“

While we consider the cloud to be an organization’s weakest link, threats posed to them via their employee’s mobile and IoT devices are also to be taken seriously as one of many attack vectors from which sensitive data can be stolen or leveraged to launch an attack,” informs Check Point. As cyber attacks grow and hackers aim patients’ data to make quick money, what patients are carefully watching is how well the healthcare providers are prepared to respond, mitigate future threats and move forward.

About the author

Meenakshi Iyer is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist covering health, technology and latest innovations. With more than 15 years of experience, she has worked with top media publications in the country.

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InnoBRIDGE Sweden 2019 : Report

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Fri, 31 May 2019 04:56:06 +0000

Executive summary

InnoBRIDGE is an initiative of InnovatioCuris (IC) along with Swedish partners, Swecare and Business Region Gothenburg, where the primary aim is to create a seamless access platform for the Indian healthcare stakeholders to the Swedish healthcare stakeholders, to strengthen healthcare collaboration between Indian healthcare organizations and the Swedish organizations and showcase the best of Swedish healthcare to the Indian delegates.

Innovation unit in Hospitals

The hospitals that we visited had an innovation unit running over ten years and have formalized the innovation process. From sourcing of unmet needs from stakeholders (patients, care providers etc) to running of an innovation marathon. Such an intervention can be beneficial for hospitals in India and a collaboration can be sought from interested Swedish hospitals to launch such trainings and innovation programs.

Developing healthcare AI

Through the intervention of innovation units in hospitals and county level regional initiatives, Swedish agencies are evolving the understanding of developing AI solutions. With possibilities to pay with data to develop AI tools, hands-on experiments about trying latest AI tools to build an informative position are some of the considerations already being made at the Swedish end. There is a natural synergy between India and Sweden on the topic of AI^[1]. India can offer data to build AI and can gain from the Swedish expertise of processes and considerations to be made for collecting and refining data. These synergies were discussed at the India Nordic Seminar by stakeholders in detail from both sides.

New Innovation Model of large private companies to incubate SMEs

A path breaking innovation model, which is experimented by AstraZeneca in form of AZ Bioventures at their Gothenborg site was a key showcase of the visit. Home to some 30 SMEs for last 5 years, the model has already resulted in 5 Initial Public Offers to some billion dollar successes. The model was discussed in last year’s Davos Summit^[2] and now actively being taken up by other corporates like ABB, Volvo in Sweden and AkzoNobel in Netherlands as an inspiration to unlock innovation in the ecosystem.

Also Read:
Sweden-India Collaboration in Health Sector
Indo-Swedish Collaboration

Day 1

Figure 1 - Indian delegation with Swecare members at H2 Health Hub

The visit started with a visit to H2 Health Hub in Stockholm which is a coworking space where Nordic Health Tech startups can connect, collaborate and share their innovations. Currently, there are 45 startups representing 26 countries in this space. The Indian delegation met representatives from the Swedish Ministry of Health, Swecare, SMEs and startups comprising of medical technologies, wellness, Health IT, mental health, pharmaceutical, radiology solutions, etc. The Sweden Ministry of Health representative shared his views on how Sweden is facilitating cross-border collaboration with India by using innovation to increase social impact such as the 10-years MoU signed between Sweden and AIIMS Jodhpur aimed at learning and exchanging best practices. The discussion also pointed out the India-Sweden collaborative industrial research and development program between Vinnova (Swedish government agency) and GITA (executing organization under the Department of Science and Technology, India). The collaboration aims at innovation projects linked to addressing global challenges such as climate change and sustainable developments.

Figure 2 - Visit to EMPE diagnostics at Karolinska Institute Campus

The Indian delegates got an opportunity to go around the Karolinska Institute (KI), Sweden’s largest medical university, and academic research center. Since 1901, the Nobel Assembly at KI has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine. The prime institute has university hospital, science park and innovation center. EMPE diagnostics which has background from KI and in collaboration with KI researchers presented their rapid diagnostic solution for Tuberculosis (Tb). The test uses DNA sequencing which can correctly identify virus or bacteria and their antimicrobial resistance within 2 hrs. India has around 86,000 new cases of Tb per day and 1.7 billion people at risk. Considering these statistics, EMPE through InnovatioCuris (IC) are looking forward to venture into the Indian market.

Next was a visit to Karolinska Hospital and its Innovation Unit which has collaboration with 8 EU countries. The Region Stockholm has a policy for innovation i.e. every organization should have an innovation center. The Innovation Center is a great model which encourage and engage all stakeholders, such as health professionals, patients, medical researchers and industrial partners to address unmet needs in hospital services through innovation. The innovation activities happen in day-to-day work at all levels and across each department. The center helps identify needs, define areas for innovation and develop the best solution. There is also a certification course for innovation leaders and managers. The center showcased project I-AID (Integrated AI Diagnostics) which aims to accelerate the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare initially focusing on medical imaging and physiology. This is a learning for Indian healthcare sector wherein the hospitals foster innovation in their own setting by creating an environment where ideas can become reality.

Figure 3 - Indian delegation appreciating the serene and modern setting of Karolinska University Hospital

A part of the Indian delegation also visited the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU). Health Technology Assessment (HTA) involves systematic independent assessment of a method, including side-effects, cost-effectiveness, and ethical implications. SBU is one of the oldest organizations in the field of HTA and expressed interest in collaborating with India.

Figure 4 - Indian delegation members with SBU Staff, Sophie Werko

Day 2

The second day was in Uppsala, the fourth largest city in Sweden. Uppsala University is the oldest university in Sweden. The visit started with Region Uppsala where the delegation was welcomed by the chairman of the board, Vivianne Macdisi. Region Uppsala Innovation has a R&D department for 2 hospitals, primary care centers, and mobile units. The ideas from employees, patients, and relatives are collected by each hospital unit’s idea coordinator. The ideas are assessed and approved by idea counsel. The feedback on the idea is conveyed to the ideator. Region Uppsala innovation also organizes a workshop called innovation race where companies and innovators such as employees generate ideas and work together towards the idea.

The county also has Uppsala Innovation Center (UIC) which is the world’s fourth-best university-affiliated business incubator. UIC offers business development programs and supports innovative startups and growth companies to commercialize, scale-up and access the international market. UIC provides expert help, awareness and knowledge for companies, and a national platform to connect the best companies.

Figure 5 - Dr V K Singh from Indian delegation presented his healthcare innovation book to the chairman of Swecare board and Uppsala regional council, Ms Vivianne Macdisi

Day 3

The delegation had the opportunity to attend e-health matchmaking event, Vitalis which is the largest eHealth event in Scandinavian. Vitalis themes included Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Decision support, medical imaging, home care, elderly care, remote health care, and robotics.

The Business Region Gothenburg and Swecare organized a special seminar ‘AI and Collaborations in AI and Innovation’^[3]. The keynote speech was given by Linda Swirtun, program manager of Vinnova, Sweden’s government agency for innovation. Vinnova funds healthcare/life sciences innovation projects and research by collaborating internationally. Under the Swedish- Indian Innovation Partnership, the Swedish companies can collaborate with companies in India in joint research and innovation projects to address global challenges such as climate change and sustainable development. The corporate-driven collaborations can be in the area of smart cities and clean technologies, digitalization, and IoT.

Figure 6 - Linda Swirtun sharing the first keynote about India Sweden Collaboration

The panel discussions had representatives from the Nordic-Baltic region and India. The first panel focused on the transnational collaborations between the two regions and its challenges. Rohini Pimple, RICH, Dr V K Singh, InnovatioCuris, Dr Sandeep Bhalla, PHFI, Kingshuk Poddar, Medivalley Incubator represented the Indian side. Lars Lindskold, Swelife AI Institute, Iris Ohrn, Business Region Gothenburg, Jaanus Pikani, Scanbalt Forum and Magnus Bjorsne, AZ BioVenturehub represented the Nordic Baltic side. The session was moderated by Shampa Bari of Swecare. The Indian panelist discussed how the current government has been very supportive and driving innovation in all sectors. There have been changes in policies and regulations which has led to a smooth process for collaborations. India has huge data which can be used to develop AI tools by countries like Sweden. Also, knowledge sharing between the regions could be beneficial. The panelist further discussed the unmet needs, and public-private partnership models working in India. The research cluster of India shared the opportunities of life sciences. The government incubation center shared how it can be a soft-landing spot for Nordic-Baltic companies for medical devices. The representative from the Public Health Foundation of India discussed the challenges in public health in India and how capacity building can be done at scale. The Nordic-Baltic panelist emphasized on the various technologies which are relevant for India. In addition, the representative from Business Region Gothenburg stated that it is easier to do research collaboration – to test and validate one’s product in Sweden as compared to others. Furthermore, the Nordic/Baltic region has a strong IP protection regime. Therefore, the collaboration will be a win-win situation for both the regions.

Figure 7 - First panel had regions and clusters from both sides discussing collaboration

The second panel brought together hands-on experts on AI both from the developer and user side. Indian side was represented by Pradeep Mathapati, HCL, Deepali Jetley, Qwazent Healthcare. Swedish side was represented by Annie Chandy from LUDC, Devdatt Dhubhashi from Chalmers University of Technology and Peter Soderman from Karolinska University Hospital. The session was moderated by Sachin Gaur from InnovatioCuris. The panel discussed in depth the challenges of AI development and how processes are evolving at the end of the health system to collect and refine data. Interesting observations were made on the role of data in AI, future job roles for AI in health sector and business models that may emerge when the providers and IT players collaborate.

Figure 8 - Panel 2 keynote was shared by Pradeep Mathapati from HCL Germany office

Day 4

The last day gave a perspective about the second largest city of Sweden, Gothenburg. The delegation was welcomed by Business Region Gothenburg, West Swedish Chamber of Commerce, and Surgical Science. Surgical Science have virtual reality simulators for surgeries like evidence-based laparoscopic and endoscopic training. The representative of West Swedish Chamber of Commerce discussed why Sweden is interested in investing in India as it is an emerging market after China, and it is a volume market with rich data. India also has a large pool of highly skilled IT professionals. On the other hand, Sweden is one of the world’s largest 10 economies and has become one of the most innovative countries in the world. Sweden is home to companies like Volvo, Ericsson, SKF, Spotify, Skype, IKEA, etc. The Indian team visited the Sahlgrenska University hospital along with Gothia Forum, which has 54 clinics in West Sweden for clinical trials.

Figure 9 - Expert from Surgical Science ready to give us a handson training on various surgeries (ofcourse simulated)

Furthermore we visited Biobank West, a Swedish Biobank showed their infrastructure where they store the blood and tissue samples. Companies such as Surgical Science, Biobank West are actively looking out for collaboration with India.

Figure 10 - Site visit of Gothia Forum, Swedish Bio Bank

The last stop was at the famous Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca (AZ) which has been ranked number one in IDEA Pharma’s Pharmaceutical Innovation Index (PII). An interesting model has been adopted by AZ called AZ BioVenture Hub. It is a collaborative innovation ecosystem for emerging biotech, medtech companies, and academic groups to strengthen competitiveness in the Nordic life science industry. AZ provides space to the SMEs and an opportunity to interact with highly-skilled AZ professionals. In addition, the SMEs can use the state-of-the-art lab facilities and infrastructure of AZ. Currently, there are thirty companies in the AZ BioVenture Hub.

Figure 11 - Indian delegation with Magnus, Pernila and Jesper from AZ BioVentures and GoCo City

AZ has also enabled a bigger initiative called as GoCo Health Innovation City. GoCo will be a collaborative innovation ecosystem with more than 30 companies working in biotech, medtech, and academia. This city will be completed in eight years and will have co-innovation programs and services such as networking events, experienced facilitators to mentor the innovator, connecting members with similar challenges, growth guides. It will be a place for focused work and healthy living.

Figure 12 - Field visit to the site of planned GoCo Health City

The way forward

Sweden being the global innovation leader and start-up hotbed can be a great example for India. The country has an innovation policy and each county is working towards it. It is focusing on the unmet needs of the population and fostering a culture of innovation. The Swedish innovations can be plugged into the Indian ecosystem and vice versa. Innovation is fostered by opening boundaries, by gathering insights and information from new connections, and by sharing knowledge. Keeping this in mind, InnoBRIDGE was envisioned and continuously working towards other collaborations.

We look forward to build on the initial interests among stakeholders from both sides in form of knowledge webinars, physical visits and signing of MoUs in cases of where the concrete plans emerge. The next milestone for us would be InnoHEALTH 2019, 4-5 October where interested Swedish stakeholders plan to visit us in India and hopefully by then we would have progressed on some of the existing discussions. Also, some of our Indian delegates look forward to participate in Vitalis next year!

Send your comments / feedback to sachin@innovatiocuris.com

References

To know more about the InnoBRIDGE Sweden 2019 program and details of Indian delegation, you may visit innovatiocuris.com/innobridge/innobridge-2019

Back to home

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Is “Smart” Technology a Saviour of Healthcare?

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Tue, 28 May 2019 09:18:22 +0000

The healthcare industry is continuously sprouting with the exponential evolution of technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and robotics, etc. These new areas of smart technology are expected to pose unswerving influence on the healthcare industry during the next couple of years.

Smart Health Technology is equipped to automatically obtain, store and compute health information from technically advanced sensors and offer personalized advice or automated actions from the collected data. This technology can interact and engage with data via Virtual or Augmented Reality to provide even more real-time experience for both, physicians and patients.

With the dissatisfaction among junior doctors reaching unprecedented levels (a staggering 80% feel excessively stressed) and the number of doctors progressing to specialty training dwindling to its lowest rate in the history of the National Health Service (NHS); these changes have never been more needed. In the event of NHS staff struggling to cope up with the growing demand for patient care, owing to the UK’s rising aging population, technology is seen as an enabler which will further propel healthcare professionals to work smarter, and not harder.

There are numerous opportunities for healthcare stakeholders/ manufacturers to innovate Smart Health Technology solutions, which are expected to streamline the precise medical care approach, e.g., telemedicine. However, there are also certain restraints in the regular healthcare system pertaining to infrastructure and adequate competencies to integrate Smart Health Technologies. Moreover, manufacturers and service providers need to ensure data security and adhere to global standards. Few of the latest applications of Smart Health Technology are Smart Apps, Smart Pills, Smart Syringes, Intelligent Fabrics, and Smart Wearable Devices.

Also Read:
AI and Cybersecurity in Digital Healthcare
World’s First AI powered Ayurveda Protocol

Smart Apps

The global smartphone users’ count is expected to surpass 2.5 billion by 2019. This exponential base of users is expected to influence the fate of health and fitness apps, which have already increased by more than 30% since 2016 (as on current date). It is estimated that almost 75% of current active mobile users run their health and fitness apps at least twice a week. With increased awareness among the mass population, people are leveraging technology to take better control of their health conditions such as asthma, infertility, obesity, and diabetes, etc. Moreover, the plethora of user data churned out from these apps are helping the market researchers access unparalleled volume of data for further in-depth and precise insights.

Smart Pills

The smart pill technology includes a wireless capsule, a receiver, and the software, which investigates and categorizes the gathered information from the patient who consumes the pill. It is an emerging technology, which is witnessing an upsurge in demand and is expected to show significant potential in the diagnostics domain in the future. The technology is used to detect gastrointestinal (GI) conditions and offers the physicians with information relating to several parameters such as pH, temperature and GI tract pressure.

For instance, the first digital pill -Abilify MyCite (approved in November 2017 by the US Food and Drug Administration) is used to track patients’ medication data. This is a venture between Tokyo-based Otsuka and California-based Proteus Digital Health (digital medicine service provider). The other key players operating in the smart pill technologies market include Novartis AG, Given Imaging Ltd., Philips Healthcare, Smartpill Inc., Olympus Medical Technology, Medtronic, Pentax Medical Co., Siemens Healthineers, Stryker Corp., GE Healthcare, and Boston Scientific Corp.

Smart Wearables

Smart wearable medical devices are small electronic products (consisting of sensors) which have computational competence. These devices are entrenched into items, which are attached to different body parts of the user. They can resemble watches, eyeglasses, clothing, contact lenses, shoes, or even jewelry.

Few of the latest smart health monitoring wearables in the global market include:

Apple Watch Series 4 (healthcare app)
Pebble Health (health monitoring app)
Zephyr BioPatch (wireless monitoring device)
Muse headband (brain-sensing monitoring headband)
AliveCor Heart Monitor (smartphone-based ECG device)
Garmin Forerunner 935 (GPS-enabled heart rate monitoring device)

Precisely, the Apple Watch Series 4 is embedded with an ability to automatically inform hospital service providers if a user becomes immobile for a stipulated period of time. This device assists people to become healthier, simultaneously storing real-time data which can be analyzed by healthcare professionals via remote patient monitoring, ensuring more precise and perceptive data for better healthcare practices. Moreover, AI can continuously monitor healthcare data and transfer the same to hospitals when necessary.

Conclusion

Upcoming healthcare technologies such as Smart Healthcare and AI are gradually renovating healthcare practices and are set to experience further innovations in the recent future. A significant number of healthcare experts are unquestionably banking on smart healthcare as a growing number of patients are keen to use these technologies and apps to improve their lifestyles. However, it is impossible to contemplate every research aspect of smart healthcare, considering its broad facets. Hence, as a result of the emergence of Smart Technology, healthcare stakeholders now should focus on imperative subjects such as security and privacy, ethics, training, biomarkers, genetics and personalized medicines, robotic-enhanced environments, human-computer interaction, and so on. The future is endless and exponential!

About the author

Victor Mukherjee is currently working as an Assistant Manager – Healthcare Practice, Infoholic Research

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TIME TO TAKE SOME INTELLIGENT DECISIONS

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 10:34:57 +0000

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The author Mikko Kotila has 12 years of continuous research and development in machine intelligence, and is the core developer of Autonomio, the first rapid machine intelligence prototyping platform for non-programmers. Mikko is the principal of Botlab, a nonprofit foundation focused on long-term thinking on machine intelligence, and decentralization, and a co-founder of Autom8, one of the world’s first deep learning focused startup foundries.

A new paradigm for use of machine intelligence in healthcare

Many national economies are on the brink of collapse under the burden of state-supported health insurance programs. For example in the US, a country that does not provide universal healthcare, the national debt is expected to double as a result of healthcare related liabilities over the next three decades. There is an even greater price to pay for the inefficiencies found in healthcare systems. When already overburdened systems are pushed to their limits, healthcare professionals are forced to make bad decisions.

In a startling example, during Hurricane Katrina, doctors and nurses at New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital found themselves incapable of making even simple decisions. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, Sheri Fink reported how patients deemed the least likely to survive, were injected with a lethal combination of drugs — even as the evacuation was already on its way.

This chilling anecdote sheds light on a greater problem underpinning many of the biggest threats hurting human society and the eco-system of our planet.

We humans are not equipped for making good decisions under stress. Positive outcomes across a multitude of fields, including healthcare, largely depend on the ability to make good decisions under unpredictable and stress inducing conditions. We, humans, are not only bad at making decisions under pressure but are poorly equipped for making any rational decisions at all.

Daniel Kahneman, in his Nobel Prize winning work on decision making, explains how after years of deliberation leading to a single decision, the person making the decision might still completely ignore the entire process of deliberation and instead make a decision driven by emotions in a whim of the moment.

An Age of Automated Decision Making

As the information age is about the focus on automating processes related to access to information, the next age, the age of “decisioning”, will focus on automation of processes related to decision making. Whereas humans are excellent in pattern detection and pattern making, an essential requirement for creating intelligent computer systems, computers are strong in making decisions where processing of facts is of vital importance. This almost magical ability of computing systems to process information includes the capability to identify and utilize extremely subtle connections between otherwise seemingly disconnected pieces of information, a feat us humans could never do on our own with the kind of precision and scale even a simple computer system can. In no other field, rational decisions are of such vital importance as in healthcare.

Not only healthcare is the most significant economic liability for many nations, but it is also the only field of practice affecting people’s everyday lives that can be considered truly as “life and death” matter. It is, therefore, the area where the human society most desperately needs help.

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Computer-aided decision systems can be categorized into three evolutionary stages, each with a corresponding quality of results, and the requirement for a level of human involvement.

Whereas up until a few years ago, most systems were still ‘descriptive’ with some examples of ‘predictive’ decision- making support systems, in the last two years the developments in the field of machine intelligence have for the first time made the dream of prescriptive expert systems realistic. Recent advancements in both open source software and commercial hardware have paved the way for rapid prototyping of ideas that promise to revolutionize the way decisions are made across a multitude of fields, including healthcare.

Examples of these advancements include deep learning platforms such as Google’s TensorFlow and Keras, unstructured data processing innovations such as word vectorization, and Nvidia’s data processing focused GPU product-line.

Regardless of the tremendous promise and the recent hype surrounding machine intelligence, some significant concerns remain without any serious attention. While machine intelligence innovators would like to focus on showcasing “what’s possible,” before introducing new ideas and processes into the healthcare apparatus, it is far more important to ask “what could go wrong”.

Morality and Healthcare Algorithms

Every machine intelligence solution can be reduced into two aspects; the data inputs available for the solution, and the means by which the solution process those inputs. These two act as the causes for the result the system provides. Algorithms underpin every decision a computer system makes, regardless of the kind of system it is. The unique feature in this regard, of modern machine intelligence systems, such as those based on neural networks and the deep learning method, is that humans cannot audit them. It is for this reason that we can get surprising results us humans could not arrive at without working with machine intelligence, and it is important to understand that surprising results may also be negative results. In many cases, adverse results in the healthcare context arise from causes that were set years or even decades before, and as of today, it is virtually impossible to establish true causality in such cases. This means that it would be almost impossible to know if a given machine intelligence solution is contributing positively in the long term or just driving shortterm efficiency. This will hold true at least for the next 100 years, or as long as it takes to understand causality in results that take decades to mature.

When in the 1980’s game theory-based principles were widely introduced in the western healthcare context, nobody predicted the consequences. For example, while nurses and doctors were incentivized to meet certain productivity quotas such as the number of days spent in the ICU, mortality rates of patients skyrocketed as a result of ICU beds being more available. In effect, a quota scheme is an example of a simple algorithm and can be used to highlight the danger that comes with introducing machine intelligence into healthcare.

This applies in particular in countries with universal healthcare and poorly performing national economy. Under such conditions, humans that make the decisions about the use of machine intelligence in the national healthcare system, are under tremendous stress. Not only their decisions affect individual patients’ lives but also have the potential for changing the destiny of an entire nation. It is very hard to see how under such conditions, non-experts, being bombarded with endless hype by self-proclaimed machine intelligence experts, would be able to make the right decisions.

In fact, government officials, healthcare professionals, nor computer and data scientists, are formally trained in morality and often lack even the most basic understanding of ontology, epistemology, and formal logic. The three legs of the stool on which rational decisions sit. As a result, as we have seen through examples in financial markets, online advertising, and other early embracers of algorithmic decision making, we end up with so-called greedy algorithms that optimize towards a given end ruthlessly without caring about anything else.

Unlike healthcare professionals, these algorithms are not afraid of losing their livelihood and reputation as a result of making the wrong decision that ends up hurting people.

While a healthcare facility or a professional working in one, could be sued for damages, in the case of machine intelligence systems, liabilities in the healthcare context have so far not been defined.

Security in Healthcare Systems

In the light of the recent events regarding ransomware, and the rapid growth in its popularity as a cybercrime tool, it does not seem too far-fetched that in the near-future entire hospitals will be targeted and held for ransom. Indeed many hospitals had already become victims of ransomware as a consequence of passive global or national attacks. In the recent WannaCrypt ransomware attack individual medical devices were rendered temporarily useless after being infected.

Siemens released multiple warnings about its healthcare devices being possibly vulnerable to WannaCrypt. Beau Woods, deputy director of Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council said that it was likely that many important medical devices such as MRIs and other crucial computer-aided systems were rendered temporarily useless by the attack.

These examples show how healthcare organizations and their technology partners are currently incapable of securing important systems. Whereas in the human operated healthcare apparatus, the devastation is so easy to create, in a highly automated machine intelligence based healthcare apparatus, the problem would be significantly amplified.

Here too, regarding security and healthcare systems, we have to seriously consider the implications of the machine intelligence ideas that are adopted today, regarding the threat landscape over the next few decades.

For example, current cryptographic methods are all based on so-called key exchange cryptography. Any sudden improvement in computation power, for instance in the form of quantum computing becoming practical, will lead to an immediate collapse of the key exchange based security paradigm. In a machine intelligence dominated healthcare apparatus, collapse of the key exchange based security paradigm has the potential for leading to the greatest human travesty in the history of the world. In the absence of serious discussion about such longer-term threats, it will not be possible to make the right decisions regarding decision-making automation and wider adoption of machine intelligence based expert systems in healthcare.

The Importance of Human Touch

Sometime in the distant future, we may be able to completely automate certain key aspects of healthcare, such as triage management. Even then it is of significant importance to not lose sight of the essence of healthcare; taking care of people. Taking care of people is one part taking care of their physical body, and one part taking care of their feelings.

In a completely machine intelligence and robotics based triage management approach it would be hard for patients to feel that they are being taken care of in the way they feel when an actual doctor is treating them.

On the other hand, in a very short period of time, the doctors would lose their ability to deal with the basic day-to-day taking care of patients that still today keep them overworked.

Because algorithms don’t feel anything, for example, empathy, it is also likely that as specialist doctors increasingly get their inputs from those algorithms, they become further distanced from the human aspect that some argue is necessary for healing practice. In this light, perhaps it’s more reasonable for the allopathic medicine to seek intelligence from its eastern counterparts such as TCM, TTM, and Ayurveda, as opposed to seeking it from machines. Machines that ultimate base their decisions on the combination of the information they are receiving and the algorithms that process the information. Both the information and the algorithms being a product of, and therefore limited by, the people who produce them.

Combining the instruments and other marvels of the western symptomatic healthcare approach with the more holistic but in some cases inferior Eastern practices, have the potential for driving significant change within the healthcare system as we know it today.

In terms of specific machine intelligence implementations, as the point-of-view presented in this article clearly shows, the focus should be on long-term macro effects of such implementations, as opposed to focusing on short-term and micro context.

Perhaps in a future world where the western and eastern medicinal practices are better integrated and institutionalized into a new era of taking care of patients, we will be better equipped to handle the challenges that come with machine intelligence focused healthcare.

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