I think it is safe to say that no person would willingly like to die. The self preservation is something that is hard coded into us by evolution and therefore at our core, we are still survivors.
As such, if there was a way we could predict death, wouldn’t that be just lovely? We could prevent and prepare ourselves and this could help to avoid the impending death. It sure sounds like either a fantasy, that we can only witness in the magical world of the likes of Harry Potter or science fiction.
Sure, we cannot predict events like car accidents or other mishaps but we can certainly do something about our health and the plethora of data that can be generated from the various bodily systems. All this could be used to predict life expectancy as well as any sudden deterioration in the body that might lead to sudden death.
Well, researchers at a company called ExcelMedical have done just that. They have created an algorithm, that continuously monitors your vitals and predicts any chances of sudden death up to 6 hours in advance!
The algorithm is named Wave Clinical Platform and has even gotten approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is mainly for use at hospitals, so that tells you that it is ready for real world use. So, what exactly does it do?
You maybe aware of the different fitness trackers that allow you to monitor the various aspects of your health. Well, this algorithm does just that but it takes it a lot of steps further than that. First off, it monitors the vitals of a patient and analyses the data continuously.
It is smart enough to sense the subtle changes in the vitals that the medical experts may miss. Since it is continuously getting data about the patient, it is able to make predictions about any life threatening event up to six hours in advance. This is enough time for the doctors to take preventive measures.
Since the algorithm works smartly and does the heavy lifting on its own, this frees up the medical staff to conduct other activities. I think this is the first time where a program will directly assist doctors in taking care of the patient.
This breakthrough is only one among many that will be help us humans live a longer and more quality life. Medical science has already advanced so much in the last century alone that the things that we are capable of today would be considered magic at some point in history.
In the future, we are going to see AI play an active role in assisting doctors with not only directly treating the patient and even cover for them for the most part, but also in broader areas like developing medicines for diseases that are still incurable.
Also, consider things like nanobots that are in active development. One day, we could have a swarm of these swimming inside our bodies, working as a permanent and personal maintenance team, that augments the systems already in place to take care of the body.
I think by 2050, it is my personal belief that we would have easily made living a hundred years, the new normal. And who knows what we can achieve beyond that. Even immortality may be on the table. Only time will tell.
