It’s transforming how we live, work and play. We look at how it can be useful and where to watch for pitfalls.
Like a long-time partner, it finishes your sentences for you. It will start the car before you get in, turn on the music and turn up the heat when you ask it to. And sometimes it does things without you asking.
Every day, the technology behind artificial intelligence (AI) seems to present something new. Voice-activated AI assistants follow your commands to send texts, ably create and translate text, curate a music list or pick out a recipe. Smart watches, which monitor your health and fitness, connecting to your cellphone, are being followed by smart rings, mini versions of the watches. You can regulate the hot tub maintenance along with its temperature through your phone. AI-powered smart glasses are now on the market, allowing the wearer to take photographs and videos.
Then there’s a whole other AI-powered world when you hop into your car. Sure, there are self-driving cars — the phenomena that’s now upon us, but there are also AI-driven safety features like lane-departure warnings and lane-keeping assists, collision avoidance and smart cruise control along with driving monitoring systems.
With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data quickly, AI is transforming the way we live, work, play and interact with technology, sometimes without us knowing it, such as when it finishes our sentences as we type out an email or even suggests appropriate responses to incoming emails. Among its abilities are ever-increasing applications that can help seniors living at home in their everyday lives, allowing for increased independence.
“The opportunities are just wonderful,“ says Jon Dron, associate dean of learning and assessment in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Alberta’s Athabasca University. “Essentially, what we’ve got is what a colleague of mine described as a drunken research assistant. It’s like having an expert on anything.
“It uses 170 million books in the Library of Congress, covering a billion pages of text. That’s a fraction of what they’ve got. Out of that, they generate these patterns“ that are mostly sensible, but, he stresses, not always correct.
AI-driven processes, he continues, are not smart tools, but are rather more akin to a partner or assistant that can be part of a team.
The opportunities for this technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning appear endless and can be frightening when considering the possibilities. But as it transforms the world and unlocks new possibilities, it amplifies human potential.
It even comes up with phrases such as “amplify human potential“ when asked to describe itself.
On the health front, AI is already proving particularly helpful. Wearable devices allow the tracking of vital signs and can signal in real time any abnormalities. Home monitoring systems — and even smart watches — can detect falls or accidents, so help can be on the way without requiring the individual to make a call. AI-based medical assistants can create reminders for appointments and when to take medications. There are also efforts to create a chatbot that can carry on a conversation and express emotion in its responses.
“They’re being used in health care in lots of different ways,“ says Dr. Jessica Cuppage, chief medical innovation officer at Baycrest Hospital, who also has a clinical role in post-acute care at the Toronto facility. “They are pattern-recognition tools. They basically collect a variety of different data inputs and then they use those data inputs for some sort of outcome of interest.“
At the Bruyère Health Research Institute in Ottawa, researcher Lisa Sheehy is using virtual reality and AI to create a virtual companion for residents with dementia. The companion, Kiera, focuses on engaging the residents in reminiscences and storytelling. Another application has it being used for pain management or during wound dressing changes, as a distraction.
Another Bruyère initiative has used AI to better predict a seniors’ health trajectory in advance, to then make better decisions about their care. The research team has developed web-based prediction algorithms to help users understand their risk for various diseases and their subsequent possible health-care needs. Life expectancy calculators (projectbiglife.ca/calculators/elder-life) determine how long someone could live, based on their health information and current ability to look after themselves.
Some of the clinical tools predict the presence or absence of a disease, Cuppage says. Much health information can be revealed through AI-powered tools, which could include monitoring vital signs and analyzing bloodwork results.
Location monitoring systems include not just the wearables, but remotely connected measuring tools such as a weigh scale. Through AI speech patterns, behaviour and other individual actions can be analyzed to predict the possibility of a worsening risk or a disease, including cognitive decline or the potential for dementia-related concerns such as agitation, wandering and falling. Data can be used to create alerts about changes in other health conditions, such as heart failure, that require medical care. Some hospitals are using AI tools to predict clinical outcome based on an individual’s record.
AI-powered solutions can analyze speech patterns, behaviour and daily activity to predict when cognitive decline may worsen or when behavioural issues such as agitation or wandering are likely to arise. This allows caregivers to anticipate and prepare, providing proactive care that is tailored to the individual’s evolving needs.
The Possibilities by Baycrest dementia care model, based in cognitive neuroscience, provides memory support to residents of Baycrest Terraces. It helps develop customized leisure activities, creating social and spiritual connections and finding opportunities in skills and hobbies.
An AI-enabled fall detection system predicts and responds to falls more quickly. And Baycrest uses a smart toilet, which provides alerts when an unusual toileting pattern begins to develop in patients.
Given the benefits, there is a push to further develop supports for our aging community with AI, as Canada’s senior population is expected to exceed 10.4 million by 2037, representing nearly 25 per cent of the population.
Cuppage sees potential for AI to help develop individual treatment plans to better match a solution to a patient. Not all medications work the same way for all people and some are at greater risk of certain diseases than others, she points out.
“One of the really interesting opportunities with AI in older adult care is personalized medicine. AI can take in far more data inputs than a brain can. There’s a lot of interesting research going on [in] aspects of a person’s health data — physiologic data, but also their genomic data, for example.... to be able to provide hyper-specialized and personalized information for each individual,“ she says.
She sees greater possibilities for AI for dementia care in the future. There are also initiatives to further expand personalized medicine and improve diagnostic, prognostic and treatment methods.
User beware
AI has its perils. Watch for these pitfalls.
After winning the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in AI with American physicist John J. Hopfield in 2024, British-Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton — frequently referred to as the godfather of AI — emphasized along with the wonders the technology can offer, the need to keep it safe and warned of its dangers.
“It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution, but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities,“ he told the BBC. “… I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control.“
That concern resonates for those working in all areas in which AI is seen to have a great deal of potential to assist with so many of society’s concerns.
In a financially stressed area such as education, AI presents a simple but more than inadequate solution, says Jon Dron, associate dean of learning and assessment in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Athabasca University. Through its pattern-recognition ability based on so many inputs, a computer that teaches children presents a cost-efficient solution, but ultimately, that means relying on technology to teach young humans how to be human. Dron is also worried that the human race’s creative skills could atrophy with increased reliance on technology to create things such as slides, photographs, paintings and videos. “I am an absolute geek, but I am terrified of some of the potential consequences,“ the university professor says.
While using AI to provide companionship to those aging at home alone would be an advantage, a computer-generated voice, he warns, is still not human companionship.
“AI-powered chatboxes can sometimes produce responses that are not completely accurate,“ adds Dr. Jessica Cuppage, Baycrest Hospital’s chief medical innovation officer, referring to something known as “hallucination“ or a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact. “So it's really important to verify AI-generated information.
“AI is really going to revolutionize all sectors, health care is no different … [but] it is important, as we apply AI more and more, that we do so thoughtfully.“
— Marg Bruineman