Skip to content

Surprising Science — November 15, 2014

New Health and Fitness App Will Employ IBM’s Watson

IBM’s talented and versatile Watson supercomputer is now about to become your own personal health guru. A new app will harness Watson’s abilities to allow you to obtain health and fitness advice similar to how you get driving directions from Siri.

Robert Montenegro

Klint Finley of Wired is reporting that Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-conquering supercomputer, is getting into the health and fitness business. While it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing Watson in a Richard Simmons get-up anytime soon, you may very well soon have access to its wealth of knowledge via a new smartphone app being developed by biotechnology company Pathway Genomics:

“Pathway Genomics will soon offer an app that promises to do just that. ‘It’s meant to allow patients to be the CEO of their own health,’ says Pathway Genomics CEO Jim Plante. ‘It will provide genomic information. It will pull in the patients health records, connect to activity monitors like the Fitbit.’”

Finley compares the Watson-driven app to obtaining driving directions from Siri. But instead of finding the least-congested route to the nearest Ikea, you’ll be given access to a bevy of medical textbooks and research journals. This is Watson’s second foray into the world of healthcare, as it had previously been used to help diagnose illnesses at Cedars-Sinai Hospital’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute.

For more about the new app and Watson’s impressive growing résumé, check out Finley’s full story (linked below).

Read more at Wired

Photo credit: IBM

To learn about Watson, watch this clip from IBP Senior VP Jon Iwata’s Big Think interview:

Related

a computer generated image of a human brain.

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

jwst Abell 2744 450 million

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Personal Growth

Toddler Screen Time Should Be a Shared Experience with a Parent

A new report seeks to dispel outdated myths about young children and screen exposure. While it’s important that screen time isn’t used as a replacement for personal contact, the two aren’t at all mutually exclusive.