How does medicine assess AI?

Mindaugas Galvosas, a doctor in Switzerland, is excited. “Personally, I am extremely excited for what’s ahead for the field of acoustic epidemiology, and I have no doubt that cough counting will be as mainstream as step counting is—or even as thermometry is.”

He’s talking about a cough monitoring app, Hyfe, that is powered by artificial intelligence and that its manufacturer says will be able to use a patient’s pattern of coughing to diagnose disease. “Machine learning allowed for automating cough monitoring, with the new technologies being able to run in the background of any device with a mic and timestamp coughs as they happen to a millisecond,” says Galvosas, medical officer for Hyfe.

Hyfe is one of many AI powered tools claiming to supercharge medicine, saving time and labour for overstretched medical staff. Mention of generative AI (box 1) has become inescapable in the year since the research firm OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world in November 2022. Every week it seems like a new tool promising to aid doctors is released by big and small companies alike. In July 2023, for instance, Google claimed that one of its AI systems was more effective than doctors at analysing medical scans, while also reducing doctors’ workload by 66%.1