“Since blowing away the competition on television’s Jeopardy! quiz show in 2011, IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform has been studying medicine at the IBM R&D center in Haifa,” David Shamah reports for ZDNet. “‘Watson went to medical school, and now it’s set to graduate,’ said Dr Aya Soffer, director of big data and cognitive analytics at the Israel facility. ‘We’ve had it study the medical literature, and now it’s ready to apply its natural language processing skills to real-life applications.'”
“Just in time, too. Last week, IBM announced the launch of Watson Health Cloud to ‘provide a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers, and companies focused on health and wellness solutions,'” Shamah reports. “The platform will be used by health companies Johnson and Johnson and Medtronic, as well as by Apple. The Mac maker has its own platform and hopes to become a top health company itself. It has established a new business unit, called Watson Health Cloud, to administer the big data apps that will use Watson’s intelligent analysis and understanding of medical data.”
“said Soffer, ‘Watson has a collection of APIs and SDKs that can be popped into apps, running on IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service. The APIs will query the servers for the relevant data, and the Watson technology will put it into context, providing responses with insight and intelligent analysis,'” Shamah reports. “Given IBM’s new partnership with Apple, some of those APIs are likely to end up integrated into apps that will be used with devices like the Apple Watch, to enable apps to put into context the data it collects.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In related news, Hew Haw’s Doc Campbell gets ready for Android Gear, or whatever the hell they call that mess.
Outstanding!
Siri and Watson should get married and have a baby.
Looks like Siri has a boyfriend now 😉
S Health?
This is THE most interesting thing I’ve read about the Apple Watch yet.
Anyone that thinks IBM is done, is fooling themselves. Watson + Apple will become the AI platform that may very well save us from ourselves. Autonomous distribution of goods and services will be its next blossom. A prediction.
When Apple and IBM announced Their cooperation someone on here asked if Siri and Watson would be integrated in some way. It appears that was a very intuitive conclusion.
Great. I can just tell Siri I have a headache and Watson can tell me I’m dying of beriberi and mogo of the gogogo.
Apple ought to hire a team of doctors. Not to prescribe treatment, but rather to give advice such as “based on your healthkit data and Watson’s analysis, you should go see this kind of doctor and emphasize this data”
Watson’s take will be better than the average doctor’s, so this will get things started in the right direction, and cut out some expensive preliminary steps.