Oxford

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant changes in the digital world. It can now be game-changing in healthcare as well. A recent study by an Oxford professor suggests that with the help of AI we can detect dementia way before doctors can. 

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Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, said that with the help of our smartphones we will be able to detect early signs of dementia. He explained that technology could spot increased hesitancy in a person while using their device, which is one possible sign of the condition.

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At an event discussing the pros and cons of AI at The Times and Sunday Times Literature Festival, he said he was “very optimistic” about the opportunities it could provide in healthcare. Wooldridge said: “I have colleagues at Oxford that think that AI is going to enable us to identify the onset of dementia, just from the way that people use their mobile phones.”

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AI in healthcare

AI, if used efficiently and in control, can have huge benefits to healthcare and medical field, Wooldridge said. It is already being used in some settings to help spot early onset dementia by analysing people’s speech patterns and eye movements. 

Researchers say these tools will play a significant role in reducing the burden on dementia assessment services. The average waiting time from a dementia referral to receiving a diagnosis increased from 13 weeks in 2019 to 17.7 weeks in 2021, a survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists found.

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Threats involved

Wooldridge, however, warned that large language models, such as ChatGPT, could be exploited by hackers to launch cyberattacks. He said bad actors could use chatbots to carry out attacks on institutions including the NHS and the Ministry of Defence by “firing off a huge number of requests to a website”.

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The denial of service is among the most basic forms of cyberattack, which works by overwhelming servers with an avalanche of bogus requests for data, making it impossible for legitimate web traffic to get through.

“The website just gets drowned and it can’t respond,” Wooldridge said. “Open AI, who produce ChatGPT, will probably try and prevent you from doing that. But within a few years what happens if we have all got a large language model downloaded from the dark web on our laptop or smartphone and there are just no barriers, there are no guardrails to stop that.”

(With inputs from agencies)

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