"Insurance is just one area which could benefit from mining patient information in order to acquire the best business outcomes - although at the detriment of the person attempting to get insurance. After all, why would a company agree to hand out a policy to a person whose data suggests has a high risk of a heart attack?"
"Robots, artificial intelligence and smart speakers will ease the burden on doctors and give them more time with patients, according to an NHS report on the pending technological "revolution" in healthcare.
Developments in the ability to sequence individuals' genomes - the entirety of their genetic data - will also spur on advances, according to the review published on Monday."
"Now, researchers warn that these "direct to consumer" services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they say, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer's disease."
"Functional genomics - a new area of science that looks at why small changes in a person's genetic make-up can increase the risk of diseases - deals with huge datasets. Each person has about 30,000 genes, which can be combined with others, as Hal Barron, GSK's chief scientific officer, explains. "You start to realise you're dealing with trillions and trillions of data points, even per experiment, and no human can interpret that, it's just too complicated.""