On Tuesday, Google announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including an improved overview of HealthQuery's search, medical record APIs, and a new health-centric “open” AI model.
In the search, Google says it is using AI and ranking systems to expand its “knowledge panel” responses on thousands of health-related topics, adding support for healthcare queries in Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese on mobile. The search already provides knowledge panel answers for illnesses like the flu and common colds, but the update will significantly expand the number of topics the knowledge panel covers, the company said.
Google is also debuting a search feature that it calls “people suggest” on US mobile to highlight content from users with shared experiences related to their health. For example, when someone asks about common exercises for people dealing with arthritis, what people suggest is to use AI to match reports from various forums around the web.
What suggests people are based on features like Google's personal health stories feature on YouTube seems to aim to prevent people from leaving their search for Reddit and other health advice.
“People come searching to find reliable medical information from experts, but they also value hearing from others who have similar experience,” Google's chief health officer Karen Desalvo wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “Using AI, you can organize different perspectives from online discussions into easy-to-understand topics, allowing you to quickly grasp what people are saying.”
On Tuesday, Google launched a new medical record API at Global for its Health Connect platform for Android devices. These help collect data from healthcare providers and allow users to view this data on various apps, as well as easily access information on devices such as phones, Google said.
“These APIs allow apps to read and write medical record information such as allergies, medications, vaccinations, and labs. “With these additions, Health Connect supports over 50 data types across activity, sleep, nutrition, vitals, and current medical records. You can easily connect your daily health data with data from your doctor's office.”
In an announcement of other health products, Google said the loss of the pulse detection capabilities of the Pixel Watch 3 smartwatch, which received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will be released by the end of March in the US. For example, you can detect features when you experience loss of pulse. It doesn't respond.
Google has also launched a new open AI model of drug discovery called TXGEMMA after launching a collection of Gemini AI models for multimodal use cases in healthcare. TXGEMMA is expected to be released in the coming weeks.