IBM works on AI to detect chronic diseases like Parkinson’s, diabetes

IBM is banking on artificial intelligence and connected devices to find new ways to help people stay healthy, as the world copes with an aging population and prevalent chronic diseases.

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The New York-based technology company is working with research partners on various connected devices, including sensors attached to the floor, chair or bed of patients, to help detect diseases at an early stage, according to Norishige Morimoto, vice president for research and development at IBM Japan.

“Chronic diseases like dementia are irreversible, so the only way to stop is to slow down the progress of the disease,” Morimoto said in a recent interview. “Because of the slow progression, those signs are very difficult to connect unless constantly monitored.”

Precise detection will need the help of pre-trained AI to interpret the data gathered from the sensors, such as the abnormal trembling of the patient’s limbs, which is a symptom of certain diseases. Some of the chronic illnesses being investigated by IBM include diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s.

IBM has sharpened its focus on studying the world’s aging population, especially those burdened with chronic diseases, Morimoto said.

That initiative comes as the demographic shift in age among a country’s population has moved faster in East Asia – including Japan, South Korea, and China – than any other region, according to data from the World Bank. East Asia, which also includes parts of Southeast Asia, will lose as much as 15% of its working-age population by 2040, the World Bank said. In China, a quarter of the population is expected to be over 60 years old by 2030, according to a report by China’s State Council in 2017.

The number of people around the world living with dementia is expected to explode from about 50 million at present to 152 million by 2050, while around 5% to 8% of people over the age of 60 are afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, according to a World Health Organization report in May.

While most of the technologies IBM is using for its research on chronic diseases are still in the development stage, the US company is borrowing from some real-world applications in the medical field. A wearable vest with metallic string woven into it for detection of muscle movement, for example, has been developed by IBM and Japanese smart fiber manufacturer Mitsufuji Corp. to detect the risk of heatstrokes for workers. That device is now being adapted to help detect symptoms of other diseases.

IBM, which is pursuing initiatives in the medical field with its Watson suite of AI services, applications, and tools, is not the only major high-tech firm working on using AI technologies in health care.

In China, health care has become one of the biggest applications for AI, along with security and new retail, where technologies like natural language processing and computer vision are being used to greatly improve efficiency in a country with an acute shortage of qualified doctors and nurses. From startups to technology giants, Chinese companies are seizing the opportunity to apply AI solutions to everything from machine reading of CAT scans to processing and analyzing medical queries.

Tencent Holdings, the world’s biggest video games company by revenue and operator of the ubiquitous WeChat social messaging platform, was handpicked by Beijing in 2017 to spearhead AI applications in health care, using computer vision and analysis to assist in diagnosing 700 different diseases.

Last year, Baidu – China’s leading search engine – moved to open source AI technologies that can help pathologists detect breast cancer, while ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post, announced tie-ups with hospitals for developing smart diagnosis platforms.

To unleash the potential of the AI for wider use, the technology should move from the current stage of “narrow AI,” in which the technology is designed to solve one problem at a time, to the next phase of “broad AI,” which provides the ability to understand, learn and solve multiple tasks in various disciplines, similar to what human beings can do, according to IBM’s Morimoto.