Google unveiled its latest health updates at its annual The Check Up event in Manhattan on Tuesday, including expanded support for medical records in its Health Connect service and open models to improve the efficiency of AI-powered drug discovery.
The tech giant launched its new Medical Records application programming interfaces (APIs) globally in Health Connect. The APIs enable apps to read and write medical record information like allergies, medications, immunizations and lab results in standard FHIR format. With these additions, Health Connect supports over 50 data types across activity, sleep, nutrition, vitals and now medical records to enable users to connect everyday health data with data from their doctor’s office, the company said in a press release previewing the technology update.
The company also announced a new AI co-scientist built on Gemini 2.0 to help biomedical researchers create novel hypotheses and research plans. The AI co-scientist can parse large volumes of scientific literature and generate high-quality, novel hypotheses.
"For instance, let’s say researchers want to better understand the spread of a disease-causing microbe. They can specify this research goal using natural language, and the AI co-scientist will propose testable hypotheses, including a summary of relevant published literature and a possible experimental approach," Google executives said in a blog post.
Google highlighted that the AI tool is not meant to automate the scientific process, but was designed to help experts uncover new ideas and accelerate their work.
The company is working with partners, including Imperial College London, Houston Methodist and Stanford University, to evaluate the tool and plans to launch a trusted tester program.
Google also continues to improve AI Overviews feature in Search to find credible and relevant information about health. Since launching last year, AI Overviews are one of our most popular Search features, now used by more than a billion people, according to the company.
The company is using AI and its best-in-class quality and ranking systems to expand these types of overviews to cover thousands more health topics. Google also is expanding the feature to more countries and languages, including Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, starting on mobile.
And Google added a new feature labeled “What People Suggest.” Using AI, the company organizes different perspectives from online discussions into easy-to-understand themes to give a quick look at what people are saying. For example, a person dealing with arthritis might want to know how others with this condition exercise. With this feature, they can quickly uncover real insights from people who also have the condition, with links to click out and learn more, Google said.
The company also aims to use AI to improve the efficiency of AI-powered drug discovery. It launched TxGemma, a collection of Gemma-based open models. The company said TxGemma is able to understand regular text and the structures of different therapeutic entities, like small molecules, chemicals and proteins.
Researchers can ask TxGemma questions to help predict important properties of potential new therapies, like how safe or effective they might be. Google plans to make this available to the researcher community to build on and improve through Health AI Developer Foundations later this month.
Google also announced that its Loss of Pulse Detection feature on Pixel Watch 3 will roll out in the U.S. at the end of this month. The company received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the feature which can detect when a user has experienced a loss of pulse and automatically prompts a call to emergency services.