Google is infamous for spinning up products and killing them off, often in very short order. But the tech giant's ambitions stretch into many domains that touch human lives these days. And -- it turns out -- so does Google's tendency to kill off products that its PR has previously touted as "life saving". To wit: Following a recent reconfiguration of Google's health efforts -- reported earlier by Business Insider -- the tech giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it is decommissioning its clinician support app, Streams. The app, which Google Health PR bills as a "mobile medical device", was developed back in 2015 by DeepMind, an AI division of Google -- and has been used by the U.K.'s National Health Service in the years since, with a number of NHS Trusts inking deals with DeepMind Health to roll out Streams to their clinicians.

DeepMind Technologies, a Google subsidiary and Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm, disclosed that it will adopt Blockchain technology and make use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).This move will help the company secure patient data more efficiently. DeepMind creates algorithms designed for applications, gaming protocols and stimulation. It earned fame for developing a machine-learning program that can be capable of playing video games. Likewise, DeepMind developed the so-called "Neural Turing Machine" that copies short-term memory of human beings. It signed a five-year contract with Royal Free London NHS Trust recently so it can apply the technology to healthcare. The problem is this accord created some hullabaloo as it allegedly affected confidentiality of patient data.

Acute kidney injury, or AKI, is a condition in which the kidneys stop filtering waste products from the blood. It occurs quickly (in two days or less) and debilitates an estimated 1 in 5 hospitalized patients in the U.K. and 1 in 4 hospitalized patients in the U.S. Worse still, because it's difficult to detect, AKI kills upwards of 600,000 people annually in both countries combined despite the more than $1.2 billion (£1 billion) the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) spends treating it each year. The U.K.-based AI research firm said it's made progress toward automated systems addressing the 11% of failures to detect AKI deterioration in U.S. hospitals and the 30% of preventable cases globally. Over the course of two separate joint studies conducted with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (RFL), DeepMind's health care division -- DeepMind Health -- investigated ways to flag AKI warning signs clinicians might otherwise fail to spot. The resulting pair of papers published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) and Nature Digital Medicine reveal the fruit of the organizations' labor: an algorithm that can predict the presence of AKI up to 48 hours in advance and an app that cuts missed AKI cases from 12.4% to 3.3%.

Alphabet's London-based AI lab DeepMind made history in 2016 when its AlphaGo software defeated a champion at the complex board game Go. On Tuesday, the company said it was handing off a seemingly much simpler software challenge: a health care app for hospital staff called Streams being tested by UK hospitals. That project and its staff will be transferred to DeepMind's much larger sister, Google. The announcement prompted an outcry from privacy researchers, which, along with legal constraints on the move, illustrating the challenges Google faces expanding its data-hungry operating style into the more sensitive business of health care. Last week, Google hired health industry veteran David Feinberg, who previously led the Pennsylvania health system Geisinger, to unify its scattered projects in the field.

Patients will also be better informed and able to manage their own health needs. While there is good reason for optimism, we also counsel caution. Poor results and outcomes, misuse, a reliance on bad data, privacy impacts, a perceived lack of transparency, discrimination and an adverse effect on employment could all impact AI's potential. The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust's 2015 partnership with DeepMind is a case study of what can go wrong, despite the very best of intentions. DeepMind worked with the Royal Free to develop an app that Royal Free then deployed to assist diagnosis of acute kidney injury (AKI).

Google's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind engaged in "highly questionable" practices when it struck a 2015 deal to access years' worth of UK hospital patient records held by the National Health Service, says a paper published March 16 in the journal "Health and Technology." The paper, written by Cambridge University law academic Julia Powles and Economist journalist Hal Hodson, is the first piece of scholarship to analyze the terms by which 1.6 million patient records from three London hospitals that are part of the NHS Royal Free London trust were shared with DeepMind. That agreement was replaced by a 2016 deal that the authors will analyze in future. The earlier agreement is currently being investigated by two UK regulatory bodies. One of those investigations, by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), is "close to conclusion," the ICO says. The paper argues that both DeepMind and the hospital administrations, in their eagerness to take advantage of national data-sets, were too lax in the way the data was shared.

DeepMind has recently announced a fresh collaborative partnership with the UK's health service, with plans for the artificial intelligence firm to develop machine learning technology to research breast cancer. DeepMind, a Google subsidiary, is perhaps best known for successfully building AI that is now better than humans at the ancient game of Go. But in recent months – when attempting to apply this tech to serious healthcare issues – it has been on the sidelines of a data breach storm. In July, DeepMind's collaboration with London's Royal Free hospital led to the NHS trust violating the UK's data protection laws. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) found that Royal Free's decision to share 1.6m personally identifiable patient records with DeepMind for the development of Streams – an automated kidney injury detection software – was "legally inappropriate".

Deepmind, Google's London-based AI research sibling, has opened a new unit focused on the ethical and societal questions raised by artificial intelligence. The new research unit will aim "to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all", according to the company, which hit headlines in 2016 for building the first machine to beat a world champion at the ancient Asian board game Go. The company is bringing in external advisers from academia and the charitable sector, including Columbia development professor Jeffrey Sachs, Oxford AI professor Nick Bostrom, and climate change campaigner Christiana Figueres to advise the unit. "These Fellows are important not only for the expertise that they bring but for the diversity of thought they represent," said the unit's co-leads, Verity Harding and Sean Legassick, in a blogpost announcing its creation. The unit, called DeepMind Ethics and Society, is not the AI Ethics Board that DeepMind was promised when it agreed to be acquired by Google in 2014.

So the data deal between Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. So says the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator charged with upholding data protection rules. The deal, the ICO said, erred in several ways. Royal Free should have notified its patients before handing their data to DeepMind, giving them a chance to opt out.

An NHS Trust broke the law by sharing sensitive patient records with Google's DeepMind division, the UK's data watchdog has ruled. The long-awaited decision falls in line with the conclusion drawn by Dame Fiona Caldicott, the UK's National Data Guardian in May. The pair's agreement "failed to comply" with the Data Protection Act 1998, according to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), because patients weren't informed that their information was being used. The ICO also took issue with the size of the dataset -- 1.6 million partial patient records -- leveraged by DeepMind to test Streams, an app for detecting acute kidney injury. In April 2016, New Scientist revealed that DeepMind and Royal Free London NHS Trust were working together on a medical project. As the ICO notes in its letter to the Trust, their agreement was actually formalised in September 2015, with Royal Free serving as the data controller (owner) and DeepMind as the data processor (partner).