When illness strikes, many people turn to “Doctor Google” for health advice. While this can be helpful in many cases, searching for symptoms can also throw up some terrifying potential “diagnoses”, but AI has been used to try to avoid providing either fearmongering suggestions or unhelpful advice.
Google is aware that it is often a first port of call for people trying to work out what condition they may have and how to best approach treatment, and the company has announced numerous improvements and new feature to make its offerings more helpful and trustworthy – as well as starting to provide suggestions from non-medical experts.
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At its annual The Check Up event, Google said that it has expanded its used of AI Overviews to show people information about health conditions that is genuinely helpful. The company is now able to provide “relevant, comprehensive” information on a wider range of health topics while continuing “to meet a high bar for clinical factuality”, it says.
Google is also offering suggestions from laypeople:
While people come to Search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences. That’s why we’re making it even easier to find this type of information on Search with a new feature labeled “What People Suggest.” Using AI, we’re able to organize different perspectives from online discussions into easy-to-understand themes, helping you quickly grasp what people are saying. For example, a person dealing with arthritis might want to know how others with this condition exercise. With this feature, they can quickly uncover real insights from people who also have the condition, with links to click out and learn more. “What People Suggest” is available on mobile devices in the U.S.
But the announcements do not end there. The company is also rolling out its Loss of Pulse Detection feature on Pixel Watch 3 in the US after receiving clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Google has also launched new medical records APIs to allow for better data sharing between Android app via Health Connect. There is also help for the development of therapeutic drugs:
Today, we announced TxGemma, a collection of Gemma-based open models that we hope will help improve the efficiency of AI-powered drug discovery. TxGemma is able to understand regular text and the structures of different therapeutic entities, like small molecules, chemicals and proteins. This means researchers can ask TxGemma questions to help predict important properties of potential new therapies, like how safe or effective they might be.
Later this month, we’ll be making this available to the community to build on and improve through Health AI Developer Foundations.
Other announcements include new pediatric oncology treatments and identifications aided by Gemini models, and more.
Image credit: Natee Meepian / Dreamstime.com
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