In recent years, technology companies have been investing heavily in the field of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Besides the investments from many new startups, two high-profile acquisitions highlight the key areas of focus in the development of smart healthcare. One is Oracle's $28 billion cash acquisition of electronic health record information system vendor Cerner, and the other is Microsoft's $19.7 billion cash acquisition of natural language processing vendor Nuance.
The former is easy to understand: medical information systems are the basic infrastructure of smart healthcare, and Cerner's high market share can also influence medical information exchange standards; while Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance has attracted attention because the market value of voice processing is high and its development potential is huge.
Natural language processing (NLP) has numerous applications in healthcare. The most intuitive application is assisting doctors and nurses in verbally completing medical records and forms, increasing their efficiency and allowing them to focus more on patient care. Voice input also reduces contact with equipment, minimizing the risk of infection in examination rooms or operating rooms. With an aging society, seniors often face challenges such as declining digital device operation and communication skills. NLP can enable seniors to complete registration procedures using spoken language; and even leverage advanced artificial intelligence technology to allow computers to understand seniors' meanings, improving the quality of communication between healthcare professionals and seniors.
Natural language processing has a high technical threshold. Although applications such as Siri are available on smartphones, applying it to the field of medical care requires artificial intelligence to learn specialized terminology. Moreover, Taiwan has Taiwanese, Hakka, and other languages, and there is often a habit of mixing Taiwanese and English in spoken expression. These all require breakthroughs through collaboration between Taiwan's academic and industrial communities.
Since last year, we have seen good results. Currently, on the Taiwan Sugi-2 AI supercomputer, we can see successful publications of natural language processing technologies in the fields of Taiwanese, Hakka and medical care, with a recognition rate of over 951 TP3T. Hospitals are also gradually adopting and testing these technologies.
We have a great opportunity to gain a market advantage in applying natural language processing to healthcare. Imagine: in the senior living spaces of the future, seniors can access healthcare services through natural conversation. Artificial intelligence can analyze long-term changes in spoken language characteristics to automatically monitor the psychological and physiological changes of the elderly, providing proactive and considerate support. This will make every senior feel like they have a personal healthcare assistant, creating a more welcoming home care environment for the upcoming aging society.
Source: Financial News Issue 663
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