Faces of Digital Health
F056 Digital health in Africa 1/4: Spreading health information in Tanzania (Mariatheresa Samson Kadushi)
Africa has 54 countries, that differ a lot in terms of their quality of care, political situation, and innovation. This short series explores healthcare in 4 African countries: – the most populous African country Nigeria with 200 million people, presented by a medical doctor and entrepreneur Ocoche Ubenyi, CEO of Nimedix Ecosystem,- South Africa with 59 million people is presented by a serial entrepreneur Sheraan Amod, currently the CEO RecoMed – South Africa’s largest doctor’s appointment booking platform. – Rwanda – a country with 12,6 million people and less than 700 doctors is presented by Patrick Singa Muhosa, Chief Medical Officer of Babyl – the Rwandan version of the UK company Babylon, offering online or phone consultations with doctors.
This first part explores Tanzania, with 58 million people. Mariatheresa Samson Kadushi is an ICT specialist and an entrepreneur, with rich experience running a tech company in Africa, while participating in country-level initiatives reforming communities; and also assisting small businesses, corporate companies and investors flourish. At the moment, Mariatheresa is fully engaged in building Mobile Afya (M-afya), a company trying to increase access to accurate medical information in Africa. She explains the current state of healthcare in Tanzania, and the challenges women face as entrepreneurs and seekers of medical information and help.
More about Mobile Afya: https://www.mobileafya.com/
F055 What do pink socks have to do with digital health? (Nick Adkins)
If you go to digital health conferences, you might have noticed people wearing pink socks. Or a guy with a long beard and a kilt caught your eye. That was Nick Adkins – the Co-Founder of Pinksocks Life, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting authentic human connection around the world. Pinksocks was founded five years after Nick attended Burning man in 2010. For those who don’t know it – Burning man is a special community, which gathers once a year in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Where there is nothing most of time in the year, 70.000 people come each August to enjoy life according to ten principles – radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, immediacy, and leave no trace. Many people that have been at Burning man say, it transformed them. They consequently take some of the lessons with them to the real-default world, Nick being one of them. Nick talks about the background behind the kilt, impact Pink Socks have had so far and the general encouragement to everyone to fear people less, and see the good in them. If you’re interested in seeing pink socks energy in action, go to Twitter and search for #pinksocks.
Website: https://pinksocks.life/about-us/
F054 What on Earth is up with space health? (Ilaria Cinelli)
Less than 600 people traveled to space by today. What do we know about space health so far, and why does it matter for the broader population? A discussion with Ilaria Cinelli – a biomedical engineer with a structured PhD in neural engineering. While she’s not an astronaut, she is very passionate about space and has completed the Space Studies Program of the International Space University at TU Delft (The Netherlands). She is an Associate Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association, President-Elect of the Aerospace Human Factors Association, and Member-at-Large of the Life Sciences and Biomedical Engineering Branch.
F053 How well do you sleep? (Richard Jacobs)
What are the basics of sleep hygiene, the importance of sleep and harm lack of sleep causes to our health? Richard Jacobs is the host of Future Tech Podcast and Future Tech Health Podcast. By now, he has interviewed 1800+ companies in artificial intelligence, stem cells, 3D printing, gene editing, bitcoin, blockchain, the microbiome, quantum computing, virtual reality and space exploration and more. He conducted over a hundred interviews about sleep with various sleep experts, which he did due to his personal problems with sleep. He later turned his knowledge in The Good Night’s Sleep Project, making custom-tailored-pillows based on an individual’s 14 personal characteristics.
The Good Night Sleep Project: https://www.goodnightssleepproject.com/
The Future Tech Health Podcast: https://www.futuretechhealth.com/
F052 AI in healthcare 6/6: What if AI gets out of control? (Bart De Witte)
The sixth and final episode of a short series about AI in healthcare features Bart de Witte and a discussion about data privacy, the future of AI models in healthcare and the issue of a potentially dystopian future if we decide to let monetization of healthcare data get out of control. Bart is a digital health tech expert who worked as an executive director for the world largest technology vendors such as IBM and SAP. He has been intimately involved as a mentor in the formation and growth of a dozen digital health startups, and lectures at different universities in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria. Lately, he has been on a mission to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help to solve current and future inequalities in healthcare.
Other episodes in the series: 1- The potential benefits for the patients in the first episode:https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f047-ai-in-healthcare-giving-patients-their-lives-back
2- AI development in radiology with Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Woojin Kim: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f048-ai-in-healthcare-part-25-radiology-disrupted
3- prof. Dr. Tadej Battelino, world renowned diabetologies and endocrinologist and Chief Clinical at DreaMed Diabetes about AI in diabetes: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f049-ai-in-healthcare-35-impacts-in-diabetes-tadej-battelino
4- CEO of Orbita – BIll Rogers about the development of voice technologies thanks to AI: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f050-ai-in-healthcare-46-the-power-of-voice-bill-rogers
5- stroke research in AI with Vince Madai PhD in Neuroscience, and Michelle Livne, PhD in Machine LEarning from Charite University Hospital in Berlin:https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/ai-in-healthcare-56-decision-support-for-stroke-therapy-michelle-livne-vince-madai
F051 AI in healthcare 5/6: Decision support for stroke therapy (Michelle Livne, Vince Madai)
AI models in the field of stroke with Vince Madai and Michelle Livne from Charite hospital in Berlin, who work on predictive models for decision support systems for the treatment of strokes. Vince is a senior medical AI researcher at Charité with an M.D., a Ph.D. in Medical Neuroscience and an M.A. in Medical Ethics, and Michelle is a PhD machine learning engineer with extensive experience in applying predictive algorithms in healthcare. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 at the Technion Technological Institute of Israel, Haifa she concluded her Master degree in Neuroscience at Charité University Medicine in 2014.
Apart from the current state of stroke treatment research and development, we talked about the state of digital health in Germany compared to Israel and ethical issues surrounding AI, such as data bias and data privacy. In healthcare challenges in data acquisition are reducing the opportunity to save lives and are opening many ethical dilemmas.
Some questions addressed:
Signs of strokes are well known: numbness in the arms, problems with speaking fluently. The brain is not getting enough blood. Someone calls an ambulance. What happens when a patient reaches the hospital?
How many types of strokes are there?
Time is crucial in stroke treatment – what are the current support systems available to doctors when a patient hit by stroke is brought to them? What kind of systems are in development?
Even if you are having a stroke, it might not be seen on a CT scan. A lot of AI at the moment is based on pattern recognition. If there is nothing visible on a CT – what does this mean for the development of AI supported decision support systems?
One of the discussion topics in AI is interpretability. Complex models are harder to understand and the more accurate an AI model is, the less interpretable it is. For example, a decision tree is easily interpretable, but has lower accuracy, compared to deep neural networks, that have higher accuracy and lower interpretability. Why is that important?
Opinions are divided between Yes, interpretability is needed and No, interpretability is not needed if the network proved to be effective. Where do you stand on that?
A lot of companies are working on AI, but most of the development and testing ATM happens with retrospective studies. How big of an issue is in your view lack of clinical studies done on patients? What does this mean in terms of time needed for AI support systems to come to regular clinical practice if everything needs to be validated through clinical studies which take years to finalize?
If you wanted to apply your knowledge on another field in healthcare – what could be the next frontier you could focus on that is closest to stroke research?
Responses