Cognitive IoT for Heathcare - overview
Cognitive IoT for Healthcare - IBM's smart platform to support observing, understanding, and managing individual health.
Our current healthcare model primarily relies on episodic engagements where the doctor is expected to understand a patient's health from a momentary snapshot, frequenently supported by select clinical tests. While doctors are trained to make the most out of this model, and an experienced practioner can acheive a surprising level of insight, the data available is often too limited to support the decisions being made. As a result conditions are often missed or misdiagnosed.
Innovations in microsystems and the information sciences offer a basis to support novel approaches in understanding health and delivering care. At IBM we’ve been working on ways to apply these innovations to uncover new insights from data that is already generated, and could be captured naturally from daily activities. Our focus is on building cognitive “fabrics” into the lives of individuals to facilitate personalized healthcare. These passive, non-invasive fabrics understand signals (generated from things such as sensors in everyday objects, wearables, environmental sensors and an individual) that already exist in a person’s natural environment.
We focus on collecting, integrating and analyzing signals in four key areas:
1. Physiology (e.g., molecular biomarkers, vitals, movement, sleep)
2. Behavior (e.g., activity, patterns, socialization)
3. Cognition (e.g., patient decisions, speech, mood)
4. Environment (e.g., how the patient responds in the other 3 dimensions to changes in the environment)
These signals are collected and analyzed using cognitive tools (machine learning, artificial intelligence, and simulations) to construct personal health twins for each patient. These twins can then be modeled to project the likely health trajectory of the patient and understand potential alternative pathways. These twins can produce new insights about the inner workings of our physical and mental health, and the progression over time of potential respiratory, muscular or neurological conditions.
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