The Big Picture on the “AI Turn” for Digital Health: The Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems

This article offers an analysis of the ways in which digital health innovations are being coproduced by mainstreaming of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPS) in health care. CPS blurs the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds, and creates a dynamic digital map of all things in existence that can be analyzed in ways that are much more sophisticated than a bar code scanning system. Examples of CPS include self-driving cars, wearables for digital monitoring of heart arrhythmias, industrial AI-powered robots in smart factories and health robots delivering home care services to disabled persons and rural communities. Another interesting prospect of digital health powered by AI, IoT, and CPS is remote phenotypic data capture and characterization of pharmaceutical outcomes in clinical trials in ways that are user centric and meaningful to patients. For rural or remote communities with limited access to medical product information, the IoT could bring about pharmacy and health services innovation. There are unprecedented societal challenges at intersections of digital health with AI, IoT, and CPS as well. For example, the physical and virtual worlds markedly differ in speed, scale, and temporalities, as do our physical self and digital footprints. Our efforts to map and develop effective solutions to societal corollaries of AI, IoT, and CPS need to bear in mind such asymmetries between the physical and virtual worlds. A societal issue such as privacy may emerge in different forms and intensities in the physical and virtual contexts. Digital data are highly fluid and can rapidly move across spaces and places, whereas the physical data and humans are much slower and exist in different scales than our digital footprints. It is therefore timely for the system sciences and integrative biology communities to critically engage with digital health and the related technologies, such as AI, IoT, and CPS.