What if you can get personalised medical advice that is curated to your needs and curiosities on your phone. That's the future Amballa Durga Prasad is helping to create with his work on AI chatbots in healthcare. But before we dive into the exciting stuff he's doing, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Technology is evolving and is integrating with almost every sphere. Healthcare is changing and is seeing a renovation especially technology-wise. One of the new things on the horizon is using AI chatbots to help people figure out what might be wrong when they're feeling under the weather. These apps can learn based on inputs and can give you personalized advice based on your symptoms.
They can ask you questions about how you're feeling, just like a doctor would, and then use all that information to give you a clearer picture of what might be going on. They're not replacing doctors, but they're like a first-step assistant before you decide if you need to see one.
This is where Amballa Durga Prasad comes in. He's not just any tech guy – he's someone who's been using his smarts to make healthcare better for years. He started out working on wearable tech, but then he had an idea. He thought, "What if we could use technology to help pregnant women and their babies?" So, he went ahead and started his own company to do just that.
Now, Prasad works at a company called Healthians, where he's developing all types of features to help people understand their health better. One of his biggest achievements is creating a chatbot that can answer people's health questions. This might not sound like a big deal, but think about how many questions people have about their health every day. By creating this chatbot, Prasad has made it so that people can get answers quickly, without having to wait for a doctor's appointment.
Prasad also created an app that over 3 million people have downloaded. This app helps people keep track of their health and get personalized suggestions on how to stay healthy.
Another useful thing that Prasad has worked on is a device for pregnant women to listen to their baby's heartbeat. Prasad's device makes it possible for women to experience the heartbeat of their babies from their homes. He also developed a portal to promote natural birth through evidence-based childbirth education.
Further, He has created a chatbot that can suggest what might be wrong based on your symptoms. It's like having an always-available assistant to talk to when you're not feeling well. And for the people who work in healthcare, he's made a tool that helps them give better advice to patients. It's like having a super-knowledgeable assistant at your side.
Creating all these things wasn't easy. One big challenge was making a 7-day diet plan based on people's health test results. To make it we have to think about all the different/unique health conditions, food preferences, and nutritional needs people have. Making a system that could create personalized, healthy meal plans for all these different situations was tough, but Prasad and his team pulled it off. People found it helpful for their health.
Prasad isn't just about making useful tech, though. He's also sharing what he learns with other people who work in healthcare and technology. He's written about how AI can be used to check symptoms online and how to come up with new ways to use AI in healthcare.
So, what does Prasad think is coming in healthcare? He sees a near future where AI is a big part of how doctors make decisions. Imagine your doctor having an AI assistant that can instantly recall and analyze millions of medical cases from its database to help figure out what's best for you. That's the kind of thing Prasad is working towards.
He also talks about something called "federated learning." It's a term which means finding ways for AI to learn from lots of different hospitals and clinics without compromising patient privacy. This could lead to much smarter healthcare AI that can help with all sorts of medical situations and take care of privacy issues.
Another big thing Prasad is excited about is making AI that can explain its decisions, this feature can bring AI closer to humans and is super important in healthcare because doctors and patients need to understand the AI's suggestions and make decisions accordingly. He's also looking at how AI could help diagnose and treat rare diseases which is often a big challenge for doctors.
But it's not all about diagnosis and treatment. Prasad sees AI and robots working together to make surgeries more precise. Given that some of the recent pandemics, the world has seen have resulted in millions of deaths, on a bigger scale, he thinks AI could help predict and prevent epidemics, potentially saving millions of lives. All of this might sound like a story from a 90's science fiction, but it's the world that is happening now. By combining his deep understanding of technology with a passion for improving healthcare, he's working to make a future where getting health advice and care is easier, faster, and more personalized than before.
Today might be the day when your smartphone might be your first stop when you're not feeling well. A quick chat with an AI could help you decide if you need to see a doctor, give you advice on managing your symptoms, or even help you make lifestyle changes to prevent illness in the first place.
It can be an exciting time in healthcare in terms of innovations and innovators like Amballa Durga Prasad are leading the way. While there are certainly challenges to overcome, the potential benefits of AI in healthcare can be enormous. From making healthcare more accessible to improving diagnosis and treatment, people like Amballa Durga Prasad are trying to quietly make the healthcare systems better.
