AI and Health
Last year I speculated about how AI could help us meet our Six Needs and make us happier. In that post, I imagined a future where AI could help us with our physiological needs, such as determining where we’re falling short on key nutrients or detecting if we’re at risk for certain diseases. However, I recently listened to a podcast episode where panel members from Noom, Pfizer, and Thrive Global discussed how their tools and platforms are already leveraging AI to achieve better health outcomes.
Noom uses AI for body scans to give you more information about your BMI and health risks and meal scans to give you more information about the nutritional value about the meal in front of you.
Pfizer is using AI to research drug treatments and vaccines, drastically cutting down the time it takes to launch a new product. But they’re also using AI to improve the patient experience, such as by making the literature about their drugs easier to understand in a number of languages, allowing consumers to make better informed decisions about their health. Finally, they’ve launched a resource Health Answers by Pfizer, an AI-driven search engine for getting answers to questions you may have about your health.
Thrive Global aims to use AI as a personalized coach that helps you implement “micro-steps” to make your life healthier. For example, if your AI coach knows that you work on the 4th floor of a building, it might suggest you take the stairs instead of the elevator as a way of getting more exercise; if it knows you hate salads, it’ll recommend veggie alternatives for your dinner; if it knows you are having trouble sleeping but drink 10 cups of coffee every day, it might recommend you stop drinking caffeine at 3pm for a better night’s rest.
See below for the full panel discussion (or if you prefer to listen to the episode in your podcast app of choice, search for Pfizer’s Science Will Win podcast). The panelists also discuss how nervous some people are to hand over sensitive health information to AI and how they address those concerns. Are you willing to try AI for health or do you have too many concerns about privacy? Do you have experience with any of the tools mentioned? I’d love to hear how effective they are from your perspective.