On Tuesday, March 19th local time, technology giant Google announced a series of new measures to apply artificial intelligence (AI) models to the healthcare industry during its annual health event "The Check Up".
Google has stated that its two departments, Google Research and Fitbit, are developing a new AI feature that will extract user data from sports wristbands, allowing users to understand their personal health status. With the support of Google AI model Gemini, it is possible to evaluate how exercise will affect the quality of users' sleep.
It is understood that Google announced its acquisition of Fitbit in 2019. At that time, Fitbit was the fifth largest wearable technology company in terms of global shipments, with 29 million users in over 100 countries and regions. Due to concerns about Google obtaining personal data in the United States and Europe, regulatory authorities have conducted a rigorous review of the acquisition case.
Google also announced that it will cooperate with Apollo Radiology International, an Indian medical center, to provide local AI screening for tuberculosis, lung cancer and breast cancer. Google stated that once Apollo obtains regulatory approval, this collaboration will provide 3 million scans for free over the next 10 years.
The company also stated that it is improving health information in Google search and its video website YouTube. Google's Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo stated in an interview that the latest initiative is part of Google's commitment to ensuring high-quality health information is conveyed in all products used by consumers and companies.
In the field of AI+healthcare, Google is at the forefront. DeSalvo added that the company has been exploring how to leverage its technology to address some of the "biggest health challenges". At the previous year's "The Check Up" event, Google launched the medical large-scale language model "Med PaLM 2".
Last year, Google's cloud business reached a cooperation agreement with Miaoyou Medical International in the United States to expand the use of generative artificial intelligence in the healthcare field. At Tuesday's meeting, Google stated that it is researching and fine-tuning its Gemini model to unlock new features such as advanced reasoning and understanding of a large amount of context in the field of medical applications.
Greg Corrado, a senior scientist at Google and co-founder of Google Brain, said that the surge in interest in AI has laid the foundation for medical applications. "Its rise has opened a door that could potentially become a whole new field." Google needs to engage in dialogue with doctors, patients, insurance companies, and other parties, "and this dialogue will drive change in the next decade."
It is worth mentioning that Nvidia also launched 25 new microservices (NIMs) based on medical scenarios at yesterday's GTC conference, helping healthcare companies around the world to improve efficiency based on generative AI.
Previously, Kimberly Powell, Vice President of NVIDIA Healthcare, also mentioned that NVIDIA's goal is to provide chips, cloud infrastructure, and other tools to more biotechnology companies. "Some people say that we are Nvidia's next billion dollar business."