Hailing from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Daniel is a writer and freelance translator with a background in biology. When not word-smithing, you will probably find him chasing frogs somewhere around the tropical belt.

In the future, doctors will be able to diagnose your illness before even meeting you. Recent applications of machine learning with big data are able to predict diseases--such as Alzheimer's and diabetes--with incredible accuracy, years before the onset of symptoms. To assess the likelihood of a patient developing a certain condition, physicians have traditionally relied on risk calculators such as this one. These use basic patient info such as age, weight and blood pressure to quantify the probability of occurrence of the disease in the future. A risk calculator is a simple tool that works using an equation based on the data of one or a few studies; in fact, doctors used these mathematical tools on paper back in the day, simply solving for X after filling the blanks with a patient's data.