Enabling an Ecosystem for AI Innovation in Health | The Check Up with Google ’25
- AI’s Role in Health [00:13]: AI is providing new opportunities to scale health solutions, helping everyone access the care they need and creating meaningful change in health. This involves collaboration with local governments, researchers, and NGOs to design new solutions by empowering partners with tools and technology.
Global Health Challenges and AI Solutions
- 1. Maternal Health: Predicting Travel Times to Emergency Obstetric Care [00:50]:
- Google has partnered with the On-Time Consortium (policymakers, doctors, researchers) to develop a tool that predicts travel times to emergency obstetric care facilities.
- Built using the same AI that powers Google Maps, it helps understand gaps in geographic access to identify where expecting mothers need improved care.
- Nigeria was the first country to adopt this tool in 2023, effectively allocating resources. For instance, it helped the Edo state government and Emergency Response Africa strategically relocate first responders.
- The tool is now expanding to Ghana and will be brought to more countries.
- 2. Tuberculosis (TB) Screening: Bridging Gaps in Expertise and Resources [02:23]:
- TB remains a leading cause of mortality, and there’s a shortage of trained radiologists in TB-endemic areas to interpret chest X-rays for screening.
- AI System for Chest X-ray Screening: Google introduced an AI system to screen for TB from chest X-rays, making screenings more accurate and accessible for faster treatment [02:55].
- Partnerships and Rollout:
- Partnered with Apollo Radiology International and Nexus Intelligence to roll out this system in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
- Apollo has conducted over 100,000 AI-powered screenings and aims for 3 million free screenings over the next decade [03:30].
- Nexus will donate and support over 100,000 free TB screenings in under-resourced communities across Africa after regulatory approval.
- Community-Based Screening in India: Partnered with Kushy Baby (a digital health nonprofit) to integrate Google’s Open Health Stack (tools for Android healthcare apps) to roll out a community-based TB screening program in Rajasthan, India, targeting vulnerable populations [03:57].
- 3. Early TB Detection through Sound: Health Acoustic Representations (HEAR) [04:41]:
- Subtle clues in bioacoustics (like a cough) have the potential to screen for a wide range of health conditions, including TB, using phone microphones.
- Google introduced HEAR (Health Acoustic Representations) [05:02], an acoustic foundation model to help researchers build models that can flag early signs of disease based on respiratory sounds.
- This approach has been endorsed by the Stop TB Partnership (a United Nations-hosted organization) [05:17].
- Public Availability: HEAR will be publicly available through Google’s Health AI Developer Foundations, making it easier for developers to explore ideas, build custom models faster, with less data setup and computation [05:35].
Enabling AI Innovation Ecosystem
- By making tools like Open Health Stack and Health AI Developer Foundations available, Google is empowering developers and researchers to expand what’s possible, believing that bringing together technology and partnerships is key to improving access to care for everyone everywhere [05:59].