The miracle medical device. Why it won’t work.

I was reading this post from Hacker News about an all in one kind of an medical device that will help to manage your body. It’s called GoBe and seems like it will measure your blood glucose levels, calorie intakes, sleep stress levels, hydration etc and helps you to manage them properly.

It has started a campaign on Indiegogo and looks like things are going well for the.

The idea and device looks very innovative but I’m somewhat sceptic about this device. Although it may be able to manage all these things but how accurate will it be in managing my health?

I’ve always wondered why can’t we make an app that we input our symptoms, and examination findings and the app will tell us/doctor the probable diagnosis, and the management plan. We’ve all the data, so why can’t an app get the diagnosis using them? This was an idea that I had, the ultimate health app which I thought will replace the doctors in real life.

As I moved along and leant medicine more, I realized that it won’t be that simple for an app to predict your health. Our bodies are so advanced and designed with precision and very few flaws. There are mechanisms that if one fails then another one will take on and try to keep the body in an average level as much as possible.

So all these symptoms, examination results are not static, each patient although had the same symptoms and examination findings will differ in the illness they have. They can be differentiated by taking account the finer that only a human can interpret.

So if there is such an app that can give predictions regarding one’s health it will have to take into account hundreds of finer details, and which will have to be more dynamic. I think the best way to do this is to have an advanced artificial intelligence program, an artificial intelligence program doesn’t exist up to now.

This is why I’m skeptical about such an app/device that small will be able to deliver such amount of data about managing our body with so little information and because the needs like hydration, sleep vary depending the situation and person.

Also some of the ways they describe how they’re monitoring the body like doesn’t make sense in real life, in reality there is no way to track the body cells taking up glucose under the influence of insulin.

impedance monitor in the Gobe can measure glucose by monitoring the water moving in and out of cells. Insulin opens up the cells when you eat sugar.

However I’m interested in the possibility of big data, that might be able to solve such problems. If we have data of millions of patients, then there might be a way to add them all up, find patterns and will be able to solve the next medical scenario. I hope someone will look in to the probability of using big data in solving this kind of a problem in future.

But as they say anything is possible in medicine, so we’ll see how this miracle device is going to work.