With its star turn on Jeopardy now basically ancient history, IBM's Watson supercomputer is ready for the limelight again. And judging by a recent spate of partnerships, that light could shine brightest in the mHealth arena.
Big Blue recently scooped up AlchemyAPI to accelerate next-generation growth in its cognitive computing applications for the Watson platform, which currently contains 13 APIs. The company has also opened a Watson Zone on its Bluemix cloud management platform, in essence opening the doors of the Watson ecosystem so that developers can work together on new projects.
With mobile devices and mHealth platforms opening up avenues to new data sources, healthcare providers and vendors are taking the lead in find new ways to put Watson to use.
"We're seeing an incredible diversity of use cases," Lauri Saft, director of IBM's Watson ecosystem, told mHealth News. "There's a lot of innovation (in accessing) data that wasn't accessible before. It lets this kind of agility take shape in the industry."
Company officials say some 5,000 developers are working on about 6,000 Watson applications in industries as diverse as toys (a Watson app embedded in a dinosaur that interacts with kids) and veterinary services, where Watson is helping doctors treat patients who can't communicate their problems.
In the healthcare realm, New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has developed the Watson Oncology cognitive computing system to "help physicians around the world understand and mine the subtleties of each person’s illness and make evidence-based treatment decisions," according to Mark G. Kris, an attending physician at the cancer center and the lead physician for Watson IBM Oncology. Farther south, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas is using Watson with mobility in mind. During the recent IBM InterConnect 2015 conference, Lynda Chin, M.D. Anderson's head of genomics, said developers have created an app that uses Watson to make oncology data available to physicians on a mobile app at the point of care, allowing them to fine-tune treatment plans for each patient.
"A lot of folks are still thinking in the realm of analytics," said Saft. "They're bridging people's knowledge to unstructured information and, in essence, becoming a colleague of the doctor."
Saft says Watson's use in healthcare is evolving as the cognitive computing technology becomes more precise. For example, IBM recently unveiled its Watson Personality Insights service, which analyzes trends in social media and other public data streams to create a 52-point personality profile. That, in turn, powers future interactions, so that Watson is learning as it "sits in the middle of conversations."
Among the mHealth vendors using Watson are @Point of Care Technologies, which is embedding the technology in its decision support tool for multiple sclerosis. Sandeep Pulim, the company's chief medical information office, said Watson can process inbound patient data better than other natural language processing tools, giving clinicians access to better reference tools.
"The best we could do with our platform before was enabling content to be found by clinicians … using traditional search tools," he said. "We know we could do better. With Watson … we're enabling clinicians to find the relevant content for their purpose. It's a companion tool that more easily lets them find the answers they want than just giving them the answers" they may or may not need.
At another point on the spectrum sits Welltok, the developer of a "health optimization platform" that sits between health plans and their members. Jeff Cohen, the company's principal healthcare market solutions executive, calls Watson "a nice engagement modality" that "understands a lot more about the consumer to present the right information at the right time."
"You're creating engagement, and you're continually getting smarter," he said.
Cohen thinks Watson may be part of a platform that connects payers, consumers and the ever-elusive provider. An intuitive platform that goes beyond the basic "Q&A" format, he said, would "enhance the provider's ability to build a meaningful relationship with patients."
