With the rise of AI in healthcare, there's been a lot of talk about how it will affect the job market. But what does that mean for people who work in healthcare? The truth is, we don't know for sure yet. But what's clear is that artificial intelligence will change how we approach training healthcare workers. With AI, we can provide more targeted training methods than ever before.

Drug discovery companies such as Insilico Medicine are using deepfake AI technology to design new molecules that can help treat diseases. Intel made a splash earlier this week when it unveiled its latest technology that can detect a deepfake in real-time with 96pc accuracy. AI such as this can help organisations around the world to prevent the spread of misinformation and protect themselves from cybercrime. But not all kinds of deepfakes are bad. The advancement of any emerging technology brings with it positive and negative uses – and the future of healthcare certainly has much to gain from deepfakes.

While the term "healthcare consumerism" has been used since the 1930s, today the term refers to the importance of creating a more patient or consumer-centered experience. Patients want a more integrated, seamless healthcare experience that focuses on their particular needs. Artificial intelligence (A.I.), big tech, and big data give patients more transparency, more choice, and more flexibility across the healthcare ecosystem, which helps to facilitate a more positive healthcare experience. But the use of A.I. and machine learning to improve the patient experience, particularly and most importantly in treatment outcomes, begins long before the application of telemedicine, online appointment setting, digitalization, access to real-time information and price transparency, all of which are being used within the ecosystem with varying degrees of success. Where does healthcare consumerism really begin?

Summary: Novel AI technology allows researchers to understand which brain regions directly interact with each other, which helps guide the placement of electrodes for DBS to treat neurological diseases. For millions of people with epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, electrical stimulation of the brain already is widening treatment possibilities. In the future, electrical stimulation may help people with psychiatric illness and direct brain injuries, such as stroke. However, studying how brain networks interact with each other is complicated. Brain networks can be explored by delivering brief pulses of electrical current in one area of a patient's brain while measuring voltage responses in other areas.

Phages and bacteria are locked in an ever-ongoing arms race with each other. As more antibiotics are failing us, scientists are turning to phages, which have been engineered by nature's wisdom to stay a step ahead of bacteria. In 2019, phage therapy cured two patients with drug-resistant infections. One patient was about to have his leg amputated due to an MDR (multi-drug resistant) bacterial infection. Doctors used an experimental phage therapy that cured him and saved his leg.

To find future treatments for infections, we might have to look back at the past. Before the discovery and advent of antibiotics, doctors had an altogether different strategy to treat bacterial infections. The treatment is called phage therapy, and it uses special viruses called bacteriophages or phages for short. Phages are harmless to humans, but they infect and kill bacteria. In 1923, the George Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, pioneered the use of phages to treat human infections.

Boston and San Francisco, January 7, 2020 – Pear Therapeutics, Inc., the leader in Prescription Digital Therapeutics (PDTs), announced today that it has entered into agreements with multiple technology innovators, including Firsthand Technology, Inc., leading researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Winterlight Labs, Inc., and NeuroLex Laboratories, Inc. These new agreements continue to bolster Pear's PDT platform, by adding to its library of digital biomarkers, machine learning algorithms, and digital therapeutics. Pear's investment in these cutting-edge technologies further supports its strategy to create the broadest and deepest toolset for the development of PDTs that redefine standard of care in a range of therapeutic areas. With access to these new technologies, Pear is positioned to develop PDTs in new disease areas, while leveraging machine learning to personalize and improve its existing PDTs. "We are excited to announce these agreements, which expand the leading PDT platform," said Corey McCann, M.D., Ph.D., President and CEO of Pear.

Amid the country's growing substance abuse crisis, last year the FDA cleared reSET, a mobile app that tracks substance use, cravings, and social triggers to treat dependency on alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis. The FDA's clearance makes reSET one of the first prescription "digital therapeutics"--an emerging class of evidence-based interventions that are predominantly driven by software rather than drugs. Andy Coravos is is the CEO of Elektra Labs and a member of the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science. Earlier this year, digital medicine company Akili Interactive announced that its video game for children with ADHD demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in a randomized, controlled clinical trial. That milestone paves the way for what could be the first prescription video game.

The human immune system is an astonishing diagnostic system, continuously adapting itself to detect any signal of disease in the body. Essentially, the state of the immune system tells a story about virtually everything affecting a person's health. It may sound like science fiction, but what if we could "read" this story? Our scientific understanding of human health would be fundamentally advanced. And more importantly, this would provide a foundation for a new generation of precise medical diagnostic and treatment options. Amazingly, this isn't just science fiction, but can be science fact.

One of the biggest experiments being conducted in the medical field is the possibility of deploying nanobots to treat diseases. In a major breakthrough, a team of researchers from the University of Manchester and the Chinese University of Hong Kong has created biodegradable nanobots, whose degradation can be controlled by doctors, making it possible to use them in medical applications involving non-invasive surgery. "Creating robotic systems which can be propelled and guided in the body has been and still is a holy-grail in the field of delivery system engineering. Our work takes advantage of some elements offered by nature such as fluorescence, degradability, shape. But we add engineered features such as magnetization and biological activity to come up with a proof-of-concept behind our bio-hybrid, magnetically propelled microrobots," professor Kostas Kostarelos, one of the researchers on the project, said in a press release.