IBM Watson

At the University of St. Gallen we just had a presentation on IBM Watson, the impressive 3000 core technology developed by the IT giant.

My favourite application of Watson in the healthcare field and can be seen in the picture below: Watson helps doctors and hospitals identify patients illnesses based on symptoms and personal history (which includes all medical records of the patient). Watson “cognitive” abilities are really impressive: you can type the patient symptoms and in less than a second Watson proposes a list of illnesses. The doctors can then improve the system by giving “feedback” to Watson, which in turns learns to improve its predictions. Very impressive! I can already imagine very useful apps in healthcare to support healthcare staff in remote areas of the world and in particular for the poorest patients who cannot afford to travel to hospitals to get a medical checkup.