A New Medical App Accurately Predicts When You’re Going to Die

Would you want to know?

If it was possible, would you want to know when you’re going to die? I know I wouldn’t. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that knowledge? The anticipation of my death day would just ruin my life. Screw that.

But what if you could know a few hours beforehand that you were about to have a heart attack or something, and you were able to get proactive treatment thereby saving your life? Because that’s a totally different story, and I think I’d want to know in that case. 

Thanks to rapid advances in artificial intelligence, a team of biotech engineers recently created an algorithm that they claim can accurately predict when you’re going to die, so that doctors can detect life-threatening conditions and diseases like heart attacks and embolisms as much as 6 hours in advance, and treat them before they have a chance to happen.

Medical tech company Excel Medical created a new app called the WAVE Clinical Platform, which is an algorithm that tells you approximately when you’re going to bite the dust, by performing an integrated analysis of your detailed medical history, physiology, family history, medications, and age, among other factors.

And once all that data is analyzed and your approximate time of death has been determined, the app automatically alerts an on-call doctor if it detects you might be in danger of a sudden and unexpected death in the near future.

And after a series of studies conducted at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center proved that AI systems such as WAVE can effectively help prevent unexpected deaths in hospitals, the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the app for formal use in hospitals.

The decision to approve the app came after a previous study conducted at Stanford University found that deep-learning algorithms can predict and therefore help prevent unexpected deaths in as much as 90 percent of cases.

“Everything we do as an organization aligns toward and supports the goal of eradicating unexpected deaths in hospitals,” said Lance Burton, General Manager of Excel Medical. “People may say zero unexpected deaths is unattainable. We say anything other than zero is unconscionable.”

The platform is currently set to be implemented in hospitals, but the company hopes to create a wearable device for people to use at home. Well, hey, if it saves me from a heart attack, I’d totally use it.

H/T: IFLScience