Sajeev Nair, Founder and Chairman, Vieroots Wellness Solutions explains how AI is helping to further this future of healthcare
When any normal person, who is not much initiated into modern technologies, hears about artificial intelligence today, the first thing that comes to their mind would be ChatGPT. Such is the mindshare this breakthrough program enjoys in people’s minds – a nifty piece of software that answers most of their queries with seeming intelligence but limited accuracy.
But little do most people know that ChatGPT, or more specifically its underlying technology called Large Language Models (LLMs), is just one among the many routes that researchers are utilising the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning. One such often missed avenue is the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare sector.
But before I explain these technologies, a few points about this sector itself would be beneficial. Firstly, AI being a future facing technology, the most fundamental question to ask is whether AI is furthering the future of healthcare. That brings us to the even more fundamental question of what exactly is the future of healthcare.
Is it the latest in diagnostic machines and automated interventions like robotic surgeries? Or is it the implantable pumps that monitor variables like blood sugar and heart rate and automatically release measured doses of insulin or an electric shock to make the heart beat again?
While they all sound sophisticated and high-tech, the fact of the matter is that they are all still treatments which are applicable only after a disease is fully developed or even chronic in a person. They all belong to what the healthcare industry calls Health 4.0, whereas the future is something termed Health 5.0, where concepts like personalisation, precision, prevention, and wellness are taking the centerstage.
So, coming back to my question, whether AI is helping to further this future of healthcare, my answer as a wellness author and entrepreneur would be yes. In fact, it is with the help of AI that the prevention & wellness sector is projected to overtake treatments and occupy around 60 per cent of the healthcare sector by the end of the next decade.
Personalisation lies at the very foundation of Health 5.0. While generic medicines, generic diets, generic exercises, and other such generic lifestyle modifications were the norm in modern medicine till now, Health 5.0 changes all that. Now, it is time for personalised diets, personalised exercises, and personalised medicines.
How can true personalisation of such solutions be achieved? Undoubtedly, it would be possible only by focusing on what makes you and me different from each other, or in other words, what makes each of us on this planet unique. And that is only our genetics or DNA.
Our DNA carries an enormous amount of information for our personality, intelligence & well-being, but unfortunately it also carries the genetic coding for the non-communicable diseases we have inherited from our parents and ancestors. And there are hundreds of such killer diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancers, dementia etc.
Most of us carry genetic coding for developing one or a few of such diseases during our lifetime. We may get them in an accelerated fashion or not get them at all, based on factors like lifestyle and environment, which act as triggers for these faulty disease-causing genes to get expressed or activated. That is why such diseases are commonly referred to as lifestyle diseases, as from long-running observations, doctors came to realise that bad lifestyles cause these diseases.
Another factor that also makes people unique to an extent is our metabolic makeup. This concerns itself with how our body metabolises the food we eat. The discovery of the metabolic syndrome as a core pathway in causing several diseases like diabetes, high BP, heart attack, stroke etc., makes the study of metabolic factors essential in personalisation.
But all these involve huge volumes of data. A person’s genomic data is enormous and mixing and matching it with the metabolic factors too to discover hardcoded disease risks, which have a high degree of probability is next to impossible in a timely manner with even high computing power. This is where artificial intelligence and machine learning models are coming in handy.
Detecting the disease risks is, however, only one side of the personalisation challenge. To make that truly beneficial for a person, such detected risks, along with all other variables like age, sex, existing diseases etc. should be matched against a huge set of research-validated lifestyle modifications so that these diseases can be kept at bay. Again, this is one area where AI is coming in quite useful.
Today, even in India, AI driven solutions like EPLIMO have arrived, that deliver such geno-metabolic detection of personal risk factors for any among hundreds of lifestyle diseases and also provide personalised lifestyle modifications across diet, exercise, sleep, supplements, yoga, herbal medicines, meditations, breathwork etc. to ward off such diseases. Without AI, such wellness solutions that define the future of healthcare would have been impossible.