Page 137 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

The Web of Smart Entities 123

For those people who maintain precise calendars of most of their daily
activities, one could determine the kinds and duration of their mental activ-
ities. By consulting a person’s calendar, one could determine whether some-
one reads books, completes puzzles, engages in social activities, or has other
creative pursuits. This kind of information, while not currently derived from
sensors, provides useful information that we feel belongs in the space of smart
entities and applications.
Physical health. We have already addressed fitness. While obtaining reli-
able and complete exercise data for healthy people seems fine, there are other
aspects that also ought to be measured directly rather than inferred, especially
for people with chronic illnesses. There are already medical devices that
people use, such as pulse monitors, blood-pressure monitors, and wireless
scales. If we included implanted devices, such as defibrillators, pace makers,
and blood glucose monitors, a good picture of physical health emerges even
for people with major illnesses.
An exciting future development will be the use of nano-bots (Akyildiz,
Jornet, & Pierobon, 2017), which, when placed in the body, can provide
more fine-grained monitoring of a person’s health or can be used to treat
diseases such as cancer (Gaudin, 2009).
Automatic scheduling of doctor visits. Combining a real-time accurate model
of physical health with best practices in health care, we imagine that the
model will be empowered to make appointments with various health-care
professionals as necessary. There are several immediate benefits to such a sys-
tem: it will likely reduce the number of frivolous office visits, it will likely
provide health care for people who are unwilling to see their doctor, and it
will provide for a fast response to an emerging illness. Some office visits will
likely be eliminated entirely. For example, often when our children are ill
we know that they need an antibiotic. Perhaps the systems and the regula-
tions about prescribing medication will change so that some medication can
be prescribed based on real-time data and best practices.
Another form of real-time data is input by a health-care provider. We
imagine that visits with health-care providers will remain, except that the role
of health-care providers will change. People are not often good diagnosticians
of their own mental or physical states. We believe that it takes an independent
expert to recognize and enter some health information. Notice that while
the data provided by a health-care provider is not as frequent as that of,
say, a wearable device, it nevertheless is real-time data. Another kind of data
may come in the form of revised nutrition or exercise guidelines, such as
those issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services.