Artificial Intelligence in Health Care and Medicine: A Personalized Approach

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more ubiquitous, and AI also invades health care and related fields ever more. We believe this is a good thing. Inspired by work that we have done in various projects at the Alan Turing Institute Almere (ATIA), Delft University of Technology (TUD), Utrecht University (UU), and Vrije University (VU), we’ll review a number of applications of AI in health care and medicine, mainly from a personal viewpoint, expertise and interest. In many of the projects we have worked on there is a shared focus and interest in creating a more personalized approach to health care and medicine. It is this focus on a more personalized health care that we want to highlight in this paper. To this end, we review various examples of work to illustrate and argue that AI, and Social AI in particular, has great potential for improving healthcare and enabling a more personalized approach. We show techniques from Social AI can be effectively applied in developing Behavior Change Management systems, and illustrate its use in related work on data collection for Value-Based Health Care. In particular, we’ll discuss artificial emotions, serious games for healthcare, and artificial companions to assist with the care of patients in a hospital or home setting. These companions are able to monitor the behavior of patients, help them remind of taking medication, but also can have conversations with them giving them the feeling that they are cared for. We argue that these examples of Social AI techniques can be used to enable and improve personalized health care even in times where health care is economized upon like we face in The Netherlands. More generally, in this article we discuss various methods and techniques from AI to do this.