Previous CCC Council Member Shwetak Patel’s research was recently featured in a ZME Science article “Can we screen the world? How smartphones and watches are revolutionizing global health (and just getting started)”. A new frontier of personalized medicine has arrived with the help of smart technologies such as smartphones and watches. These technologies help doctors detect and as a result efficiently fix health conditions. Almost everyone has a smartphone, and these devices collect a lot of information about us: steps, sleep, heart rate, etc. Shwetak Patel, a researcher, is leading efforts to use smartphones and their sensors for health purposes. He believes smartphones can do a lot more in health […]

Pending funding, the National Institute of Health (NIH) plans to launch the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program. Collaboratively managed by the NIH Common Fund, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the National Eye Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Library of Medicine, the program seeks to provide comprehensive, high-quality and ethically sourced datasets to catalyze the widespread use of AI in the biomedical and behavioral research communities. AI has the ability to transform the biomedical and behavioral science fields. Possible applications include informing clinical decision making, monitoring and predicting health needs in real time and […]

Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns big name brands such as Aspirin, Aleve, Midol, Cenesten and Iberogast, recently partnered with Ada Health, an AI-based assessment platform. This free app uses an AI chat robot to collect information on symptoms, patient history and other user targeted questions to generate data-driven suggestions for next steps and proper care. “Ada’s technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a highly comprehensive medical knowledge base, covering thousands of conditions. In fact, in a recent vignettes study testing the eight most popular online symptom assessment apps, Ada was proven to have the most comprehensive condition coverage, providing a condition suggestion 99% of the time, […]

Shwetak Patel, the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, was a participating laureate at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). During his presentation at HLF, Dr. Patel discussed some of the innovate health applications he and his team have developed including an app that can monitor jaundice in babies called Bilicam. Typically, it can be hard to discern if a baby has severe jaundice since many babies skin has a yellowish hue naturally. Bilicam filters certain kinds of light out of the spectrum which allows that user to track the kinds of chemicals found in the babies skin. From there you can decide whether there […]