Google launches new healthcare-related features for Search, Android
Google on Tuesday announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search for health queries, medical records APIs, and new health-focused "open" AI models.
In Search, Google says it's using AI and ranking systems to expand "knowledge panel" answers on thousands of health-related topics, and adding support for healthcare queries in Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese on mobile. Search already provided knowledge panel answers for ailments such as the flu or the common cold, but the update greatly expands the number of topics the knowledge panels cover, the company said.
Google is also debuting a Search feature it's calling "What People Suggest" on mobile in the U.S. to highlight content from users with shared experiences relating to health conditions. For instance, if someone asks about common exercises for people dealing with arthritis, What People Suggest will collate reports from various forums around the web using AI.
What People Suggest builds on capabilities like Google's personal health stories feature on YouTube, and seems pretty clearly aimed at keeping people from leaving Search for Reddit and other sources of health advice.
"While people come to Search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences," Karen DeSalvo, chief health officer at Google, wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. "Using AI, we're able to organize different perspectives from online discussions into easy-to-understand themes, helping you quickly grasp what people are saying."
Google on Tuesday also launched new medical records APIs globally for its Health Connect platform for Android devices. These will help collect data from medical providers and let users see this data across different apps, as well as make it easier to access the info on devices like phones, Google said.
"These APIs enable apps to read and write medical record information like allergies, medications, immunizations, and lab results in standard FHIR format," DeSalvo explained in the blog post. "With these additions, Health Connect supports over 50 data types across activity, sleep, nutrition, vitals, and now medical records — making it easier to connect your everyday health data with data from your doctor's office."
In other product announcements pertaining to health, Google said that the Loss of Pulse Detection feature on its Pixel Watch 3 smartwatch, which has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will launch by the end of March in the U.S. The feature can detect when you've experienced a loss of pulse — for example, due to primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, overdose, or poisoning — and automatically prompt a call to emergency services if you're unresponsive.
Google also unveiled new open AI models for drug discovery called TxGemma, following the company's launch of a collection of Gemini AI models for multimodal use cases in healthcare. TxGemma is set to be released in the coming weeks.
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