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Surprising Science — November 15, 2014

New Health and Fitness App Will Employ IBM’s Watson

IBM’s talented and versatile Watson supercomputer is now about to become your own personal health guru. A new app will harness Watson’s abilities to allow you to obtain health and fitness advice similar to how you get driving directions from Siri.

Robert Montenegro

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Klint Finley of Wired is reporting that Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-conquering supercomputer, is getting into the health and fitness business. While it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing Watson in a Richard Simmons get-up anytime soon, you may very well soon have access to its wealth of knowledge via a new smartphone app being developed by biotechnology company Pathway Genomics:

“Pathway Genomics will soon offer an app that promises to do just that. ‘It’s meant to allow patients to be the CEO of their own health,’ says Pathway Genomics CEO Jim Plante. ‘It will provide genomic information. It will pull in the patients health records, connect to activity monitors like the Fitbit.’”

Finley compares the Watson-driven app to obtaining driving directions from Siri. But instead of finding the least-congested route to the nearest Ikea, you’ll be given access to a bevy of medical textbooks and research journals. This is Watson’s second foray into the world of healthcare, as it had previously been used to help diagnose illnesses at Cedars-Sinai Hospital’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute.

For more about the new app and Watson’s impressive growing résumé, check out Finley’s full story (linked below).

Read more at Wired

Photo credit: IBM

To learn about Watson, watch this clip from IBP Senior VP Jon Iwata’s Big Think interview:

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