Millennial parents are raising the first generation of children with broadly available healthcare-related artificial intelligence technologies. By the time the Generation Alpha children – those born after 2010 – are teenagers, AI-assisted medical care will have lost its novelty and is likely to be the norm in health monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment planning. We’ve written about a wide range of current AI applications, from detecting lymphedema in breast cancer surgery survivors to helping kids make better decisions, and even improving patient adherence to medication regimens.
The IEEE recently published its second annual study of Millennial parents, Generation AI 2018. In May 2018, the research group surveyed 2,000 parents 20-36 years old who had at least one child eight years old or younger. The sample included 400 parents each in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, China, and Brazil. The study queried the parents on their comfort levels with AI-driven robotics performing surgery, AI-generated diagnosis and treatment plans, AI-determined life or death decisions with their children and their own parents, real-time AI health monitoring and tracking, and whether they believed AI would help eradicate cancer in the Generation Alpha lifetime.
Overall the Millennial parents were positive, trusting, and comfortable with the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare applications. Parents in China and India were most on-board with AI; the U.S. and U.K. parents were still positive but more reticent than the Chinese and Indians. Brazilian parents tended to respond in the middle of the five nationality groups. Regarding wearables specifically, most Millennial parents were fine with their young children, including infants and toddlers, wearing real-time holistic AI health monitors, but also reported they would be most comfortable if their kids began wearing the monitors when they were in their teens.
AI’s fast track in all areas of healthcare promises advances in preventative care and in medicine. The evolving array of biosensors collecting massive amounts of data feed machine learning algorithms and neural networks to improve diagnosis and evaluate treatment alternatives. According to the IEEE study, Millennial parents around the world are ready and receptive to AI’s contributions to medicine and healthcare.
