Healthcare and medical research are a new frontier for the Internet, with great opportunities and some risks. 

Column by Francesco Grillo and Paola Bonomo for the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. 

Healthcare and medical research can truly be the next frontier of the Internet. A smart use of data, statistics and AI tools can really revolutionize National health services. These latter used to be the badge of honor of the European welfare state, but are no longer able to guarantee the same right to health that used to be the basis of legitimization for modern States.

The opportunity to put together data, artificial intelligence, health and medical research will lead us to the “Internet of Beings” - the title of a book that will be published in a few months by the Oxford University Press. The hypothesis advanced by this book is the following: after having put together all digital devices (“internet of computers”) and, eventually, physical objects (from engines to lightbulbs, in the “internet of things”), the digital revolution is entering its “biological” phase, connecting multiple living creatures to an informative system.

Internet could be even introduced inside people’s and animals’ bodies through increasingly small, powerful and versatile sensors. Such step forward would be really impressive for at least three reasons.

First of all, the constant monitoring of vital parameters would lead to a drastic reduction of sudden deaths (e.g. for cardiac arrests); it would also help anticipating diagnoses through the identification of cancer without waiting for a screening: under certain conditions, an immediate alarm would lead to a more or less immediate intervention.

Secondly, it would be possible for sensors to act autonomously – just like in “Fantastic Voyage”, one of those 60s movies that actually predicted the future. Alivecor, a start-up based in Mountain View, not far from Google, is designing sensors that are able to respond to a heart attack.

Finally, the biggest evolutionary leap: the possibility to record how hundreds of thousands of people react – as they live their ordinary life – to minimal changes of external conditions (diet, temperature, use of medicines). This has the potential to fully revolutionize the methodology of medical research: artificial intelligence can identify patterns – even weak ones – which could offer the basis for new treatments if repeated billions of times. Such treatments would be built upon a significative basis of data: it would be possible to reduce the time and cost of research, paving the road to tailored solutions; with a significant impact, perhaps, on the notion of intellectual property itself – at the basis of the big pharma business model.

This scenario opens extraordinary opportunities, including that of living more than a hundred years, with less diseases and less burden on the national health service.

However, if such changes are not managed by visionary policy makers, there will be at least two risks.

The first is that the dream might become a nightmare: today’s concerns about cybersecurity are almost ridiculous if compared to the risks of introducing sensors in the human body. Thus, in order not to cause dystopic scenarios, it seems indispensable to share our own data with an aggregator – either private or public – governed by will-powered humans.

On the other hand, the second risk is that nothing happens, due to an excess of restrictions. This seems to be the future of Europe, which - in the past 8 years - produced a digital regulation of ten acts for a total amount of 726 pages and 563 articles. If, for instance, we prioritize a paternalistic privacy protection for citizens instead of our own potential empowerment in the relationship with our doctors, we risk to do some harm. Plus, this will not stop the US or China from moving faster than us. Besides rules, the problem is also that of being still far from exploiting the full potential of technologies, considering that many hospitals used to report their daily Covid cases via fax.

We are currently at an historical crossroads; so are our hospitals and even the Internet, which is looking for new ideas to prove that it is actually able to change everyone’s lives for the better.

It is not just about how many public resources are destined to an expenditure chapter (or in the PNRR). It is about intelligence and courage, the same courage that Europe used, after World War II, to invent national health services that still represent prosperity, solidarity and civilization.