The welfare state is essential in any advanced society, fulfilling fundamental rights such as quality healthcare or education, among others.
In the information society, the incorporation of innovation consists of an added value that facilitates a better deployment and distribution of public services. The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to apply information technologies in a transversal way. One of the most relevant innovations in recent years is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and to effectively introduce it into the daily lives of citizens, it must be accompanied by regulations that guarantee a connection between this new technology and the welfare state.
Artificial intelligence is not a single technology, but rather a set of technologies that include hardware, software, and services. Most of these technologies have immediate applications in healthcare, with many specific processes and tasks supporting them. Among the most relevant applications of Information Systems (IISS), and particularly of AI, in health, the following can be mentioned:
- Personalized assistance to patients and caregivers, including remote monitoring and assistance, alarm management, telemedicine applications or patient engagement.
- Establishment of personalized medical treatments, which can consider the analysis of genetic data, medical histories, external patterns (age, race, gender, habits,, ...), as well as other clinical or personal data.
- More precise diagnoses, thanks to the capacity of the IISS to analyse a large volume of medical data, even cross-referencing it with other patterns and references. The programs can identify details much more efficiently than people, offering doctors additional elements of assessment and even identifying potential risks and facilitating a much earlier diagnosis.
- Learning and improving knowledge through analysis and monitoring of results, also based on computational and communication capabilities applied to different treatments.
- Support for surgeries, assisting surgeons during operations using tools that improve precision and provide real-time information.
Some of these applications are closely related to the purposes of iToBoS (Intelligent Total Body Scanner for Early Detection of Melanoma), as presented in the project's multiple publications.