Reading the Body’s Signals: AI’s Ultimate Healthcare Opportunity

AI is a  major driver of investment in digital health and life sciences companies, comprising nearly half of all investment activity. Smart healthcare founders and investors have their eye on where AI is heading, and it’s moving much faster than previous technologies did. 

However, while AI dominates healthcare innovation, it has largely been applied to administrative and operational tasks – ambient notetaking, scheduling, revenue cycle management. Don’t get me wrong, improving productivity and efficiency are essential to fixing our broken healthcare system, reducing unsustainable costs, and improving the experience for patients and providers. And we are creating important companies here. But AI can do much more. It will enable true transformation when it meaningfully changes health outcomes to expand our stunted lifespans and healthspans. That is possible  when AI is used to understand our bodies’ signals, identifying them in their earliest stages. It’s starting to, and visionary founders and investors are increasingly seeing AI moving there.

The company creation model around AI “signal catchers” is beginning to emerge. I think of these breakthroughs as technology “catchers in the rye,” AI standing in a field of noise, intercepting signals that can save us from the twin cliffs of disease and early death.

Some of the costliest failures in healthcare come from missing signals the body is sending. As a result, we recognize disease too late: stage 3 – 4 cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension, fetal hypoxia, neonatal complications, etc. The impact of late stage, or even mid-stage, diagnosis can be catastrophic, shortening both lifespan and healthspan. I recently sat for a fireside chat with former Surgeon General, Dr. Rich Carmona, who said a healthy baby born in the U.S. today has the potential to live one hundred and twenty years. Yet, the life expectancy of that baby is closer to eighty years. Americans could be living fifty percent longer than they are. Said differently, from day one we’re forfeiting one third of our potential lifespan.

Globally, over the last two decades, we’ve added approximately five years to life expectancy. That sounds promising. However, if we remove the impact of declining infant mortality, the number drops to roughly three years, or one and a half years per decade. Steady progress, but nothing to write home about. In fact, it’s a slower longevity improvement than we gained for most of the last century. The ratio of healthspan (as measured by HALE) to lifespan hasn’t budged, and in absolute terms, the gap has widened. We live on average a dozen years in less than full health. We’re not fundamentally changing the shape of health — we’re making marginal improvements.

And in some areas, we’re not even doing that. Take maternity in the U.S. Maternal mortality is higher than it was twenty years ago. Severe complications are up. C-sections have increased. Despite extraordinary innovation and spending, outcomes at scale remain stubbornly resistant to improving.

Now, layer AI onto this picture. The narrative says we’re in a revolution. The evidence says something more measured, with AI working mostly in the plumbing of healthcare: better workflows, less administrative burden, improved decision support. But the effect on clinical endpoints is still nascent and unevenly distributed. This isn’t yet a revolution in health; it’s an evolution in delivery. But we’re at an inflection point.

New AI-driven scientific innovations from early stage companies to major academic medical centers are increasingly identifying and amplifying existing vital signs and biomarkers. AI is also enabling the creation of biomarkers that weren’t previously observable or actionable – catching the signals. The evidence is beginning to catch up with the promise. The Mayo Clinic recently published in the journal Gut the results of an AI model that helped specialists detect pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before clinical diagnosis.

Using AI to understand the body’s signals will increase our years and close the gap between the good ones and bad ones. We will see these innovations materialize across the care spectrum, from predisposition and prediction to diagnosis and prognosis to treatment selection and ongoing monitoring. Already, AI is starting to have an impact by making invisible physiological signals actionable through non-or-minimally-invasive methods, with investment and collaboration activity heating up. Consider these potential game changers: 

The eye as a window to health

• Optain (an Aegis portfolio company) is applying AI to the science of oculomics, using the vasculature of the eye to predict eye and cardiovascular disease. 
• Harmoneyes uses an AI-powered eye-tracking platform that identifies and predicts a person’s cognitive, emotional, and physical state based on eye movements. 

Better fetal monitoring to reduce brain injuries and unnecessary C-sections

• VitalTrace is pioneering continuous lactate monitoring to accurately detect fetal distress. 
• Wavelet (an Aegis portfolio company) has launched the first non-invasive fetal EEG monitoring platform. 

Voice as a biomarker

• Canary Speech and Sonde Health are developing vocal biomarkers to support early detection of cognitive and respiratory diseases.

Our bodies have always sent us signals. But we haven’t had the sensory apparatus to detect them nor the intelligence to understand them. Medical breakthroughs throughout history have come from closing that gap. The stethoscope reveals signals carried through sound. X-rays uncovers signals embedded in bone. Ultrasound uses echoes of high-frequency sound waves to capture signals in soft tissue. AI is poised to do something similar — by helping us detect, improve, and interpret signals that have always been there.

Valuable information has been hidden within patterns too subtle, complex, or multidimensional for humans to recognize and use — until now. We are on the cusp of an age of anticipatory medicine, an explosion in our ability to read the body’s signals and catch the killers before they do their damage. Acting on these  signals to save and improve lives will  drive the transformation in lifespan and healthspan that should be healthcare’s ultimate goal.

Photo: Pakorn Supajitsoontorn, Getty Images

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