Organized by Divine Fuh, HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and Fanny Chabrol, CEPED-IRD, France and funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, this workshop is located within the framework of the project Future Hospitals: 4IR/AI and the Ethics of Care at HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa headed by Divine Fuh, and the "Hospital Multiple" at CEPED-IRD headed by Fanny Chabrol. The workshop aims at proposing new ethnographic methodological and conceptual tools to think and imagine the "hospital of the future" in Africa, in particular, the way artificial intelligence (AI) seeks to transform and is currently transforming access to health care in hospitals today and in the coming years. Our project aims to build a problematisation of the hospital of the future and an ethnographic method to critically analyse the ethical, regulatory, and political issues with respect to AI, healthcare, and hospitals on the continent. We consider the "hospital of the future" – through the digitalization and computer automation of healthcare – as a global promise that needs to be challenged by ethnographic methods within hospitals, engaging with persons interacting with them. The first line of inquiry will challenge the logic of adoption and Africa as a place where development policies are implemented, where infrastructure projects are developed, in which technological innovation, mainly coming from the West, is presented as the promise of better health for those in need.

A research project between Bayer and digital health company Huma will use artificial intelligence to detect lung cancer in CT scans – and determine which type a patient has, in order to direct treatment. AI is already being applied by a number of groups, with some studies indicating it can even be more effective than trained radiologists in detecting subtle patterns that indicate the presence of tumours. About 75% of patients with lung cancer die within five years of diagnosis, but prospects rise significantly if it is detected while still confined to the lung. At the moment, that happens in only around a third of cases. Bayer and Huma's project wants to go a step further than detecting the presence or absence of a tumour.

Digital health company Medopad today announced that it's rebranding to Huma and acquiring two companies -- BioBeats and Tarilian Laser Technologies (TLT) -- to add support for new biomarkers to its AI-powered patient monitoring platform. When contacted for comment, a Huma spokesperson declined to disclose the purchase price for the two companies. The acquisitions would appear to be strategic -- increasingly, health systems and hospitals are employing AI-enabled telemedical services to triage and treat patients potentially infected with COVID-19. Huma previously leveraged AI to identify signs of chronic diseases like Parkinson's disease, in partnership with Tencent, but the incorporation of BioBeats' and TLT's technologies will enable it to analyze mental and cardiovascular health data. The thinking goes that the more holistic Huma's platform becomes, the better health outcomes are likely to be.