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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine what Glass can do to medicine? Imagine a doctor wearing Glass, repeating the patient's symptoms and being given a dynamically updated list of differential diagnoses with formulary medications and next steps in management based on the most recent research. It would be the perfect assistant. I get hot and sweaty just thinking about it.

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This is basically the same as expert systems back in the 70s, with a cooler UX.

Unfortunately it will probably fail again due to mostly the same reasons, difficulty in knowledge collection and user rejection (by medics, for example) as they feel to "proud" to be "replaced" by a machine. :-/

It sounds dreadful. I would much rather they be using a tablet so they can be 110% sure that the symptoms and diagnoses are clearly articulated. Having them rushed across a tiny screen or read out sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

Devices like Glass should only be used for small, simple problems where a wrong answer isn't going to result in someone dying.

I'm doing the PGM class on Coursera, and Prof. Koller mentioned that one reason the expert diagnosis systems never took off in the 90s was that it was hard to integrate them into the doctor's workflow.

She also mentioned that situation was changing with the advent of usable tablets, so maybe we'll see some progress here.

At what point does the doctor become unnecessary? Someone or some thing needs to know how to interpret the patient's symptoms accurately, but I imagine after expert systems focusing on symptom-> recommendation become commonplace that the next step will be to eliminate the role of the interpreter.

Patient examination is rarely about lack of information to complex research, but really about the art of listening and empathy. Therefore, Google Glass like device will most likely distract the doctor from focusing and empathizing with the patient.

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