The era of AIs It is getting closer, and although we already live surrounded by them, we have not yet reached even a tenth of its possible potential, so we have many years of evolution left, with news like the one we will see today, which is very interesting.
It is an AI that is designed to detect diseasesso we are not just talking about leisure, but about something important that could affect us all, and that would be able to, with just an Apple Watch, warn us of a possible health problem.
Disease detection with an Apple Watch and AI
This year a curious and promising study came out: a group of scientists from MIT, together with Empirical Health, decided to see if the data generated by our Apple Watch can help detect health problems before we realize it. And we're not talking about a handful of records: they used no less than a few 3 million days of data collected from Apple Watches to train an artificial intelligence with that objective.
And what does “3 million days of data” mean? Basically, it's a huge collection of information about things like heart rate, activity, sleep, and other metrics that the watch measures in the background over a long time and a lot of people. With that large database, the researchers taught a model called JETS to “understand” patterns that could be related to medical conditions (even when the data was incomplete or gapped), learning not only to guess numbers, but to interpret relevant health signals.
The trick of this model is its way of training: first it learns from all the information available without the need for medical labels, and then it refines itself with data that is labeled. This allows the system to find signals that we would not see with the naked eyesuch as subtle changes that may indicate hypertension, chronic fatigue, or certain heart problems. Everything will depend, in turn, on the type of Apple Watch and the sensors we have available to collect information.
Although it is not a perfect machine nor does it replace a doctor, initial test results show that the model is quite good at differentiating possible cases from non-cases in various conditions. And the most interesting thing is what this represents: if technology continues to improve, devices like the Apple Watch could become much more useful tools for proactively monitoring our health, alerting us about subtle signs before symptoms are truly noticeable. They may not be perfect, but they can make us go see a doctor before it's too late, despite false alarms.
And you, do you think that this type of research and AI tools will improve not only our entertainment, but also the health of all of us, alerting us to possible problems without having to do constant medical check-ups? Leave us a comment with your opinion, although there is still a long way to go to see this in action, at least as precisely as we would like.
