At our annual The Check Up event, we shared how we’re using AI to advance science and build products to help improve health outcomes for everyone, everywhere.
Today at The Check Up, Google’s annual health event, we shared how we’re using AI to help improve health outcomes for everyone, everywhere.
In This Content
1. Positive health outcomes in the search
Search and features like AI Overviews are used by people to find reliable and pertinent information about health, from common illnesses to uncommon conditions. People are more pleased with their search results and are asking longer, more intricate questions since AI Overviews launched last year. And with recent health-focused advancements on Gemini models, we continue to further improve AI Overviews on health topics so they’re more relevant, comprehensive and continue to meet a high bar for clinical factuality.
We’ve also continued to provide knowledge panels on common health topics, like the flu or the common cold, and help people connect with reliable sources across the web. Now, using AI and our best-in-class quality and ranking systems, we’ve been able to expand these types of overviews to cover thousands more health topics. Beginning with mobile, we are also expanding to additional nations and languages, including Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. While people come to Search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences. That’s why we’re making it even easier to find this type of information on Search with a new feature labeled “What People Suggest.” We can quickly help you understand what people are saying by organizing the various points of view from online discussions into easy-to-understand themes using AI. For example, a person dealing with arthritis might want to know how others with this condition exercise. They can quickly find real insights from people who also have the condition using this feature, which includes links to click to learn more. “What People Suggest” is available on mobile devices in the U.S.
2. Medical Records APIs in Health Connect
Managing your health can be hard when information is spread across different apps. Our brand-new Medical Records APIs have gone live globally in Health Connect to assist. These APIs enable apps to read and write medical record information like allergies, medications, immunizations and lab results in standard FHIR format. 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.
On Health Connect, your data is stored locally on your device, and you’re in full control of which apps have access to your data and what kind of data is shared with them.
3. Pulse Detection Loss
We received American approval last month. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Pixel Watch 3’s Loss of Pulse Detection feature. This first-of-its-kind feature can automatically call emergency services for potentially life-saving care if you are unresponsive when you have a loss of pulse (your heart stops beating due to an event like primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, an overdose, or poisoning). First announced in 2024 with EU availability, this feature is currently available in 14 countries and we’ll begin rolling it out in the U.S. at the end of March.
4. Co-scientist in AI
Research is at the heart of our work, whether that’s incremental updates that build on years of progress, or groundbreaking developments that change the industry and how our partners work. We recently launched an AI co-scientist, a brand-new Gemini 2.0 system, to assist biomedical researchers in developing novel hypotheses and research plans. The AI co-scientist helps researchers parse large volumes of scientific literature and generate high-quality, novel hypotheses. For instance, let’s say researchers want to better understand the spread of a disease-causing microbe. The AI co-scientist will offer testable hypotheses, a summary of relevant published literature, and a possible experimental strategy, as they can specify this research objective using natural language. This collaborative tool is intended to assist experts in locating novel concepts and accelerating their work, despite the fact that it is not intended to automate the scientific process. We’re already working with partners, including Imperial College London, Houston Methodist and Stanford University, and are keen to see how researchers around the world use this tool. Even though it is still in its infancy, there is already a lot of enthusiasm for our forthcoming trusted tester program.
5. TxGemma
Since the process of developing therapeutic drugs from concept to approved use takes a long time and costs a lot of money, we are working with other researchers to find new ways to make this process more efficient. TxGemma, a collection of open Gemma models that we hope will increase the effectiveness of AI-powered drug discovery, was announced today. TxGemma can comprehend both standard text and the structures of various therapeutic entities, such as proteins, small molecules, and chemicals. This means that TxGemma questions can be used by researchers to predict important properties of potential new therapies, such as their safety or effectiveness. Later this month, we’ll be making this available to the community to build on and improve through Health AI Developer Foundations.
6. Treatment options for pediatric oncology
With the help of Google, the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology in the Netherlands is developing an AI tool called Capricorn. It uses Gemini models to help physicians accelerate the identification of personalized cancer treatments by combining vast public medical data and de-identified patient data.
Capricorn quickly generates treatment options and relevant medical publications summaries based on its analysis, enabling physicians to have more in-depth discussions about how to achieve the best health outcomes for their pediatric patients. With AI, physicians have more time to dedicate to what’s most important: patient care.