Let's start with the problem:
Misdiagnosis is at least as deadly as automobiles or breast cancer.
Here's the sad part: There is information that we don't use.
I think we've heard this many, many times.
Not that much has really changed in healthcare - In some ways since Ether Dome in over 100 years.
Medicine is often still practiced in silos, by departments, by fiefdoms.
And often information in the big data era we're in now is often still trapped in those.
And we have the opportunity to start thinking about redefining health care in new ways.
We are living in a time when exponential technology is transforming every part of our life.
Artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic genomics, digital medicine. All of these areas, and no place is it having a bigger impact than in the field of medicine.
So, literally we're living in a decade where were going to transform the future practice of medicine.
We're going to transform, literally, a person's ability to live a healthy life.
I'm Neil Jacobstein, Co-Chair of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics at Singularity University here at the NASA Ames campus.
I got here through kind of an interesting route.
I started out doing environmental science work and the work that we did, I thought was valuable, but was largely addressing problems that were symptoms of a larger pathology.
Our society falls for immediate gratification.
So I spent many years looking at new design systems and new decision-making systems using artificial intelligence technology.
That's what really engages me about the work that we're doing here at Singularity University.
We are using exponential technologies to examine and address the problems that are really systemic and endemic in our system.
Especially during the summer, when we have a ten week program,
the first third is roughly based on getting people up to speed and cross training and getting out of their silos.
The second third is doing some deeper dives and the kind of final push is to instigate new teams, collaborations and projects
that hopefully in some cases can spin off into the real world to make big impact.
We specifically have a pretty high bar for them, that says that we want your project to be able to positively impact the lives of a billion people within ten years.
And we take that seriously, it's not just rhetoric.
The mission of FutureMed is to bring together folks from across the spectrum.
From physicians to technologists to innovators to investors. Some of whom have never been in healthcare before.
To understand what is the cutting edge in a whole range of fast moving technologies.
Where's the puck now? Where's it going? And where do you suppose it is converging?
The exciting thing about medicine and health is that it has become an information technology.
We're understanding the software of life.
Anything that's in information technology expands exponentially.
The genome project itself is actually a small, renegade project that people didn't take seriously.
Seven and a half years into this fifteen year project, 1% had been completed.
The skeptics were saying, "I told you this wasn't going to work!"
"1% in seven and a half years is going to take 750 years like we said."
My reaction was, "No! 1%? We're almost done."
We mapped the first human genome in 2001 and then by about half way through the oughts.
We were doing that and it didn't cost a billion dollars, it cost a million dollars.
It's still not something that you'd want to put on a credit card and buy,
but now in the last year, we can do this for a few thousand dollars per person.
What's the most common question people ask of themselves before seeing a doctor? "Do I need to see one?"
We already know that theres a tyranny of common sense.
If I were to say to you, "Whats the shape of the world?" and you told me, "Round."
I'd say "You're a fool. It's obviously flat."
Right?
I mean do we go around the sun or does the sun go around us? "Clearly the sun goes around us."
"I mean, how ridiculous?"
The tyranny of common sense.
Why would you treat me the same exact way you'd treat someone who is twice my age, male with a different ethnic background?
There's a lot of things that go into why someone is sick.
Imagine if you had a buddy, one of your colleagues, who read voluminously, basically read everything that was out there.
And when you had to make a decision could come up and say, "Listen, I just read 4,000 articles that are relevant to your decision."
What Watson does and will do, is make it easier for the decision maker to make an evidence supported decision.
Healthcare has to change.
We need to be able to make you part of healthcare. Make it easier for you to get the services you need.
So you don't have to go to the doctor to get your blood pressure checked, because you can do that at home.
You don't have to go to the doctor to get your blood sugar checked, you can do that at home.
You will know a lot of what you need to know before your doctor does.
The way for change to happen is not to attack a system head on.
It's to attack it in some narrow niche that's compelling for the user.
I think one of the things that's really exciting about the quantified self movement.
Is that it allows us to fly by wire. That is it allows us to let the data speak.
To let devices like this one tell me how many steps I've taken today. Rather than my faulty recollection of how many steps I've taken.
And look at that delta between actual behavior and target behavior.
And really get a systematic feedback loop between where we want to be and where we are.
What I will talk about tonight: What does it take to take a FutureMed idea and turn it into a PresentMed product.
What it takes in terms of clinical research to prove a good idea is a real idea.
What this is is a case and an App that turns your Iphone into a clinical quality electrocardiograph device.
What we really want to do is not only disrupt medicine the way you think about it here or in the United States or in developed nations.
What do we do in under developed countries?
People who are a two day walk from a doctor: How do you get healthcare to them?
In a country like India 400 million people have never seen a doctor in their life.
These are staggering numbers.
And we simply cannot use the model we have been using of expecting people to come to hospitals and clinics.
We are to figure out a way for clinics to reach the people.
And even people who make less than a dollar a day have an smartphone.
We are looking at things like taking pictures of your retina.
A lot of systemic diseases that have manifestation in the eye,
whether its diabetes or hypertension or metabolic conditions.
The smartphone is going to become the conduit, the hub, through which we deliver healthcare.
Hi, I'm Jack Andraka, I'm a 16 year old and I'm a sophomore in high school.
And I've developed a new way to detect pancreatic cancer. Also, I'm a whitewater kayaker and I fold origami.
A new way that's 168x faster, over 26,000x less expensive and over 400x times more sensitive than the current standards for pancreatic cancer detection.
My main message is that I just came up with this using Google and Wikipedia. At the beginning, I didn't even know I had a pancreas.
So, just imagine what you could do using Google and Wikipedia.
Imagine having a device like this that you could give to an epileptic.
What if it could send an alarm to their doctor or their family member when they've had a seizure?
And what if a few years from now, it can actually give a warning in the preictal state to say a seizure is about to happen?
An X-Prize was launched recently to do a medical tricorder. You remember Spock and McCoy? To build a home base device that integrates these technologies.
Over 200 teams have now entered that competition and one of them started here at the first FutureMed in 2011 called Scanadu.
I actually have one of their prototypes here. This is called a Kidcorder.
And when you hold this to your forehead, it'll talk to your smart phone.
It'll pick up your heart rate, your respiratory rate, your relative blood pressure, how oxygenated your blood is.
And potentially communicate later with your physician or a smart set of algorithmic questions to figure out: does your child need to go to the emergency room?
It'll bring the cost of healthcare diagnostics literally down towards zero for the wealthiest or for the poorest.
A quote from Einstein: "For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope."
And that's what some of these are.
We're all focused on this idea of harnessing accelerating technologies for change,
but, the beauty is that it's so multi-disciplinary and everybody's kinda taken from one discipline and just thrown into another.
So, you get these oblique angles of insight that happen, and that's very special.
The range of incredibly creative thinking.
There was a presentation last year using, in effect, a 3-D printer to create a functioning liver.
The early stages of that.
When someone needs a new heart, liver, lung:
Instead of waiting for someone to die, you're going to take a skin sample and grow yourself a brand new heart, liver or lung.
It's going to become sort of crazy to think that you had to wait for a person to pass away before you can have an organ transplant.
What I'm interested about is this notion of a hardware App store.
We all talk about software apps, we download them and play with them.
It has unleashed a new creativity because we have decoupled the developers from the distribution platform.
Now imagine you can do the same thing for hardware.
Where we can create very simple add ons that mate with your phone. That can unleash another level of creativity.
People are just rejecting the idea that this is impossible. That maybe this will fail.
But if 5% of it is successful, I mean that's "wow!"
She was awake. She was alert. She could hear everything, she could feel everything, but she couldn't move and she couldn't speak.
And I'd ask you just for a moment to imagine yourself in that condition:
To imagine: "What's going to happen next?"
"Will I walk again?"
"Will I talk again?"
"Will I live?"
"Do I want to live?"
These are very real questions. These are the questions she asked herself.
And, it's for her and for people's whose physical disabilities may not be quite as dramatic,
that we're hoping that we can develop a technology that will restore communication, will restore mobility, and will restore independence.
We're getting better, we're learning more. But there's so much more that we need to learn about harnessing the electrical activity in the brain.
A scientist might be motivated just by abstract formulas and insights into the universe,
but, what excites me is to actually get all these letters from blind people saying they were able to get an education or keep their job because of the technology I created.
That's the thrill of being an inventor.
When you see the ability to get somebody who can't walk, up and walking and interacting with their family,
and you find out the first thing they want to do is hug because they haven't hugged in 5,10 years,
you really realize like wow, thats cool. That's really meaningful.
Happily, the story gets a little bit better.
She's then going to be able to twist that arm to take the drink herself.
(applause)
Really, the outcomes have to be human, and they have to touch human beings.
To me, if we can touch over 1 billion lives with the things that are being constructed here as ideas: That's just a really exciting time to look forward to.
And I hope I'm around.
When people walk away from Singularity University and FutureMed programs: I want them to think, "Wow, their world has turned upside down."
Their view and beliefs of potential and possibility have been sort of rewired.
The profound transformations we're going to see in health and medicine, longevity,
human physical well-being: It's a whole different paradigm. Health and medicine used to be hit or miss.
There are people taking on incredible challenges, and not resting. Things are going to get better.
We have the minds and the people and the energy to do it.