Shaping a Brighter Future: AI’s impact on healthcare

Andy Acker: The level of innovation that we’re seeing today in the healthcare sector is like nothing I would have imagined. I’ve been investing in the healthcare sector for almost 25 years at Janus Henderson, and the breakthroughs that we’re seeing today and the impact that they’re having on patients are just beyond imagining. Almost…a lot of what we’re doing today would have seemed like science fiction, even 10 years ago.

Michael Wooldridge: So, AI has a huge range of potential applications. It’s going to affect pretty much every, every aspect of our lives, every aspect of our working life, our leisure life. It will create endless new opportunities. But healthcare, I think, is one of the application areas where it’s going to be, has the potential at least to be transformative globally. AI in healthcare, I think, is the single most exciting application of this technology.

Sarah de Lagarde: At the end of 2022, I was involved in an unfortunate accident. As I was using public transport in London, I slipped on a wet and uneven platform and fell in between the gap, in between the stationary train and the platform, and nobody heard or saw me. The train departed, and I lost my right arm above the elbow and my right leg below the knee.

I was eventually found and rescued and then embarked on a long journey of rehabilitation. I was fitted with prosthetics; especially the arm prosthetic is an interesting piece of technology, as it is a state-of-the-art bionic arm that has an articulated elbow and a multi-articulated hand. It is a non-invasive piece of kit. It’s basically a custom-made socket that has about 16 electrodes embedded in that are fitted on the residual limb. It enables me to think about a gesture, I twitch the right combination of muscles inside the socket, the electrodes pick up the signal, and transform that into electric impulses that lead me to be able to move my bionic hand.

Simon Pollard: COVVI was formed back in July 2017, with a mission to deliver a world-leading prosthetic hand with users and clinicians at its heart. Working together, we wanted to actuate real positive change to the lives of people with upper-limb deficiency and give the end patient a real choice.

It has unrivaled or unmatched technology in its make-up. Our innovative remote-assist features – which basically means we can access the hand anywhere remotely in the world and help with configurations – help with set-up or any problems from a software issue. We then have a user-friendly app, which is there to help the amputees obviously go in and change any settings and reduce the mental and physical workload required to basically start up the hand. It has 24 programmable grips and gestures, which obviously facilitate fine motor skills and offer precise and versatile control over a wide range of finger movements.

Here we are today, with a hand which we believe is changing people’s lives on a day-to-day basis. Machine learning provides a personalized control. So, AI algorithms learn from your individual movements and patterns and preferences and allow the prosthetic to adapt and tailor its behavior.

de Lagarde: The artificial intelligence part inside the bionic arm is really interesting because it makes the users life so much easier. Every day I use the arm, data gets collected in how I use the arm, and that data sits in a central server, but it also sits inside an application that I have on my phone, and I can calibrate that every day. And every day the machine learns how I use those specific grip patterns, and, in essence, it makes it faster and easier for me to execute. So, a gesture that would have taken up a lot of brain power for me to activate, over time, it will go from 10 seconds to almost instantaneously, and that is super helpful for the end user.

Wooldridge: Where the technology is going, I say, is, you know, the idea of enabling people to live an ordinary life in circumstances where previously they would have just been ruled out of that because they wouldn’t have had the the capabilities to do it.

I have colleagues who think that they’re going to be able to recognize the onset of dementia just from the way that people use their smartphone. So, for example, one of the symptoms of dementia will be that simple cognitive tasks like finding somebody in a contact list on your phone, that you get confused and it takes you longer to do that. So, spotting changes in people’s behaviour through AI is something which sounds feasible. Now, I emphasize the technology isn’t there yet, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be.

Acker: The medical advances that are happening today we think are just the tip of the iceberg of what will be coming in the future. The amount of information and processing power is compounding, and the amount of information that we’re getting about, for example, the underlying genetic causes of disease, these are compounding at such a high rate that we think they’re going to lead to significant breakthroughs in the future. In fact, many have called the upcoming century the Century of Biology, and we couldn’t agree more with that assessment.

de Lagarde: I’m confident that this is just the beginning of this incredible medical technology progress that we’re making with artificial intelligence. I can see that this technology can be applied to a much vaster range of not just prosthetics but support for increased mobility, which will be interesting for an aging population to remain mobile for as long as they can.

Acker: The opportunities for innovation remain enormous. There are so many high, unmet medical needs. If we think about cancer, heart disease, diabetes, those suffering from accidents and needing replacement of limbs. And we see medicine and healthcare changing dramatically with these applications of technology, and we think that’s going to create enormous opportunities for investors in the years to come.