Page 138 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

124 Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

An interesting side effect of this scenario is the effect it would have on
how doctors and health-care professionals spend their time. According to
the New York Times, doctors find it hard to spend more than 8min per
patient visit (Chen, 2013). With the ability to measure blood pressure
and weight, run blood tests, and conduct other simple tests by connected
devices, there will likely be a drop-off in patient visits. This reduction in
office visits will allow doctors to spend more time with those patients
who need it. More importantly it will change the role of a health-care pro-
fessional. We believe that the role of health-care professionals will transform
into that of a health coach or advocate.
With real-time data, emergency responses can be automated with great
benefits; see Lange (2013) for an insightful use case. Consider a car crash;
based on data from wearables as well as telematics of all of the involved
parties, the severity of a crash can be assessed and the need for medical assis-
tance evaluated. If emergency assistance is deemed necessary, controlling for
privacy, pertinent information about the patient should be sent to the attend-
ing paramedics, and the person’s physical health records should interact with
the assigned hospital’s scheduling system. Finally, if appropriate, the model
could alert family members and coworkers. Notice that the data is sourced
from wearable devices as well as from multiple devices external to us.
In today’s healthcare world, patients and physicians are seen as partners.
Many patients want to know more about their conditions or feel that they
are in charge of their own health care. As such, we imagine that if a model
determines a person has a certain illness, it may make information about that
condition available to that person in a way that appeals to their background
knowledge.
Mens sana in corpore sano. With an adequate model of a person’s mental
and physical health, one can now develop a more complete model of a per-
son’s overall health and automate the model to maintain overall health to
specifications that will likely include competing parameters. This automa-
tion may be as simple as dynamically injecting physical or recreational mental
exercises into a person’s calendar, based on real-time data of a person’s men-
tal or physical state. Perhaps a system may decide to send an employee home
at an earlier time or assign them different work so as to alleviate stress.

7.4 THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE WEB
OF SMART ENTITIES

Processing sensor data to elicit higher levels of information, such as might be
seen in smart mirrors or laugh-o-meter applications, requires advanced