Already, AI is making waves in most industries. Experts are expecting that it will have a huge impact on most aspects of our lives, including helping us drive better, take over for customer support at businesses, and even provide each of us with a personal assistant.
One of AI’s biggest advantages over humans is its ability to analyze massive amounts of data and handle multiple tasks at once. Alongside humans, AI can also learn and constantly improve at a task to best accomplish its goal. If that goal is to help us be healthier, then it could really make an impact in the personal health world.
Combining IoT Health Devices With an AI
Fitbits, smartwatches, calorie trackers ” heck, there is even a smart fork that tells you how quickly to eat. We have tons of devices designed to track our personal health, each inputting quite a bit of data. Some try to use that data to better themselves, but it’s likely a lot of useful data goes unused.
Enter AI into monitoring your health. An AI could fully analyze data from IoT devices to help the user better understand their health efforts. By analyzing this data over time, combined with personal assessments of your health, AI could gain a better, and unbiased, understanding of your physical health and be a tool in improving it.
Guiding Nutrition and Exercise
The world of personal health can be very confusing. There are constantly new fad diets and exercise routines to help you lose weight and get in ideal shape, and staying dedicated to a health plan can feel impossible at times.
You can’t realistically hire a personal trainer to hold your hand every second of the day to stop you from snacking on junk food or force you to go to the gym, but an AI could help be that push you need.
Utilizing an AI with IoT devices could help track your calorie intake, guide you in exercising to get the body and health you want, and encourage you to stay healthier. It wouldn’t even be that hard to do in most cases. Simply wear a Fitbit-like device, snap photos and weigh your food, and the AI could help track your health and guide you to improve it.
Plus, the more it learns about both the individual and humans as a whole, it can understand the needs of cheat days and relaxation. It could notice that you had a more stressful day at work by monitoring a variety of factors (like higher blood pressure and heartbeat, increased intake of comfort food, etc.) and suggest an appropriate solution. If you’re a person who can relieve stress by working out, the AI could push you to do that. If you relieve stress by relaxing and watching TV, the AI could suggest taking a day off and push you to do what works for you.
Better Healthcare Monitoring for the General Public
Better technology leads to better healthcare. AI is no different. There are hundreds of applications for AI in the healthcare industry, from record management to diagnose, but we are going to talk about monitoring patients, especially outside of the doctor office.
Thanks to IoT devices, it’s possible to monitor a patient’s health practically anywhere in the world. While not every person needs it, monitoring patients at a higher risk of something bad happening ” like heart attacks or strokes ” could help save their lives. Combine that tech with AI, and both doctors and patients could get early alerts of potential problems, identify if something is currently going wrong, and even contact emergency services.
When a patient is diagnosed with a dangerous disease or condition, a healthcare professional could assign an AI to monitor their health both inside and outside the doctor office/hospital. This could help improve inpatient and outpatient healthcare by giving doctors an extra tool in caring for their patients.
Similarly to above, this AI could do more than monitor, it could be a voice for action to the patient. Already, healthcare professionals are pushing patients to utilize apps and tech to improve their health, and AI would play naturally into that effort. An AI with medical history for a patient, combined with monitoring tools, could push patients to make good health decisions, like eating right, exercising, taking medicine, and more.
Your Own Personal Healthcare Assistant
Did you ever see the movie Big Hero 6? One of the main characters, Baymax, was an AI-driven robot design to help heal people, regardless of the problem. That included physical and mental problems.
While it will be decades or even centuries till we have that level of AI robots in the home, it is possible for us to soon have AI assistants in a virtual form. Smartphones and IoT devices are the gateways to having an AI monitor our health, guide us in becoming healthier, and push us to meet our personal health goals. Imagine having a coach/cheerleader encouraging and helping you constantly to reach your weight loss goal. This is how AI could absolutely change how we approach getting and being healthy.
