New medical artificial intelligence (AI) app Ada combines technological innovation with personalized health care. Acting as a sophisticated personal health companion, Ada can assess patients’ symptoms, track individuals’ health progress, and share data with doctors. With medical clinics across the province facing budget restrictions and staffing shortages, any health care innovation designed to improve efficiencies in treatment promises to alleviate some of the pressures on both doctors and patients. Medical artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a feature of fictional films. It’s an app. Ada, a new personal health companion app, uses AI technology to learn and grow to ask more sophisticated questions as users engage with it in order to better track individual health. Ada rapidly ascended to No. 1 in the App Store following its 2016 Fall release in 80 countries, including Canada. Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Claire Novorol emphasizes the focus on accessibility, personalization, and advancement in the design process for the app. As a user-friendly AI personal health companion, Ada checks symptoms by using uncomplicated language to ask a series of individualized questions (carefully selecting follow-up questions based on the new data it collects to streamline the information-gathering process). Ada uses its intelligence to adapt as it becomes more familiar with the details of a user’s medical history over time. This detailed individualized approach not only assists patients in answering questions about their health, but can also be shared with their doctor in the form of symptom assessment reports which analyze the data input by the user. Due to the AI design of this technology, Ada improves with every step of symptom assessment by learning from the user’s responses to each successive question. Accessible directly from their mobile device, the user can build, store, and manage a complete personalized medical overview of symptoms, known allergies, and current medications in a secure and sophisticated format. Further expanding on its accessibility and information sharing, Ada also allows the user to track the health of multiple users through a multi-profile management platform. For instance, parents may monitor children’s symptoms and overall health from their phone and share reports with their doctors prior to scheduled visits in order to maximize efficiency of care. Ada, the AI personal health companion, offers a promising glimpse into the potential future of modern healthcare by combining advanced technology with personalized treatment. This app provides a level of detail and accessibility that is often not currently feasible during a typical doctor’s visit due to multiple limitations within the healthcare system, including appointment time constraints. Depending on language modifications and the level of sophistication of user data, Ada also exhibits the potential to break down barriers between doctors and patients with regard to the quality of patient histories by collecting extremely detailed information on patient experiences in their own terms. This exciting new technology requires further research to examine the prospective benefits and logistics of incorporating a personal health companion approach to revolutionizing treatment Source
