Smart Healthcare in the Age of AI: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Prospects

Chronic disease is a disease lasting three months or longer. A report by National Health Council states that in 2009 states that

• 7 out of 10 deaths in the U.S. are due to chronic diseases. 
• Heart disease, cancer, and stroke account for more than half of all deaths each year. 
• Incurable and ongoing chronic diseases affect approximately 133 million Americans, representing more than 40% of the country’s total population. It also estimates that by 2020, the number is projected to grow to an estimated 157 million. 
• 75% of all health care costs are due to chronic conditions. 

Surgery. Image credit: Max Pixel, CC0 Public Domain

Add this to the fact that 22% of the population would reach the age 60 or more by 2050, it will further increase the demand for healthcare systems in the years to come. 

Mahmoud Nasr, MD. Milon Islam, Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, and Yuri Quintana have discussed how AI and ML can help build smart, effective & affordable healthcare systems at scale in their research paper. The research paper is titled “Smart Healthcare in the Age of AI: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Prospects” and forms the basis of the following text

The objective of this Research Paper

In the words of the researchers,

The goal of this paper is to explore the state-of-the-art smart healthcare systems that highlight the significant areas of research, including wearable and smartphone-based health monitoring, machine learning for predictive analytics, and assistive frameworks developed for assisted living environments, including social robots. The main contributions of the paper can be summarized as follows: Provide a systemic review of state-of-the-art research in smart medical devices, machine learning for disease prediction, AAL, and software architecture; Compare approaches to each problem, highlight their advantages and challenges, and present recommendations for improvement in future studies; Present a holistic overview of the smart healthcare field to provide a complete view of how technologies in different areas can be combined to accelerate smart healthcare.

Image credit: arXiv:2107.03924 [cs.CY]

The above image shows the overall workflow of the reviewed healthcare systems.

Healthcare monitoring devices in IOT

With constant advancements in wearable devices & Smartphone Solutions for health monitoring, they have become an integral part of healthcare monitoring. These devices can track our heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, SpO2, Glucose. These devices can also check for any falls, track location via GPS, use camera if required, and push this data to a cloud. This data can be a) Made available to us, our family, OR physicians; OR b) Can be used to trigger help to emergency services such as ambulance, hospital, etc. 

AI & ML Assistance in Healthcare

AI and ML enable the sensors discussed above to have a brain of their own & improve diagnosis & detection with time. These tools can effectively monitor for diseases such as Coronavirus, Heart Disease, Diabetes, etc.

Ambient Assisted Living

Focussed around older adults, Ambient Assisted Living integrates sensors and actuators in an IoT environment to communicate and provide enhanced lifestyle and human-independent care for older adults. AI & ML can help us identify user needs, build Smart Homes for enhanced care, and provide Social Robots for physical & mental assistance. 

The research paper also discussed Software Integration Architectures, challenges & future work for this technology explained in detail in the research paper.

Conclusion

The researchers have advocated Smart Healthcare in the research paper because it is effective, secure, and easy to deploy and because it can be a low-cost solution when implemented at scale. The smart healthcare framework could be a useful tool for medical professionals to cope with the ever-growing healthcare demand.