Will our future doctor be an application capable of establishing a diagnosis to treat everyday ailments? Probably yes, according to the results of a study published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) medical journal which unveils Babylon, a health application capable of understanding symptoms and offering appropriate treatment.
A British start-up has developed Babylon, an application intended to replace certain medical appointments. Babylon uses a network of databases and its system is capable of analyzing hundreds of millions of symptom combinations in real time. It can take into account personal medical information, the patient’s environment and all known genetic elements.
The app will not issue official prescriptions but will provide recommendations, names and dosage of available and effective drugs for the symptoms described.
In addition to providing patients with disease care advice, Babylon will be able to continuously monitor information on kidneys, liver, bones, blood levels. cholesterol, sleep and heart rate. It will issue alerts about any areas that are “red” or flashing “orange”, and will suggest actions to improve the health of users on a daily basis. A service that will be billed at 7 euros per month. 21,500 people are currently testing a version of this application.
Possible misinterpretations
Asked by the magazine of the prestigious institute, Clare Aitchison, doctor from Norwich (England), is less convinced of the legitimacy of this system. “It is true that a computer can process a very large amount of data, but it is unable to communicate with its user,” she explains. “People describe symptoms in very different ways depending on their personality.” A human doctor who knows his patient well is able to filter what he is told and make a diagnosis accordingly. “
The doctor also claims that the system can become too sensitive and cause an unnecessary increase in medical consultations or conversely, patients risk missed diagnoses.
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