A new app measures vitals and helps manage care regimens for aging adults, and all it needs is for them to smile for their phone camera.
The Together app is the first program to use “generative AI” to record a variety of symptoms including blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen, according to Renee, the company that introduced it last week.
“Together makes otherwise cumbersome healthcare tasks magically easy,” co-founder Renee Dua, MD, said in a statement.
The app also helps with medication refills by scanning labels and managing the prescriptions, as shown in this video demo.
While Together may be the first to use imaging for those specific functions, other apps that make use of selfies for diagnostics are in development.
Anura, an app being worked on by Nuralogix, can give over 1,000 health diagnostics from a 30-second selfie. It is designed to be able to monitor depression and stress levels, as well as calculate body mass index, its makers said in January.
Although observers note claims of expansive selfie technology demand proof of concept, at least one study last year reviewed facial-recognition-based disease diagnostics and concluded that it is a valuable emerging technology.
Among the kinds of diseases in which such AI was most accurate in diagnosing are: endocrine and metabolic disease, neuromuscular disease, and acute and severe illness, the authors state.
“Compared to the routine diagnostic approach, facial-recognition-based detection is more accurate, objective, comprehensive, and informative,” the authors concluded, while cautioning that “privacy and security are essential ethical problems that need more consideration and regulation.”
