this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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If done well, training AI on this kind of data could be a good thing. It could make say your smartphone (for example) tell you that you have a problem, be used as a first diagnostic and so on. Invaluable in countries where doctors are scarce for example.
If I understand correctly the patients consent is never asked before their data is collected, I could easily see this data being sold to advertising companies. Imagine having a heart attack and when you get home all you see is ads for life insurance.
Giving each person in a hospital a $300 stethoscope + $200 phone + $120 for the subscription + a whole new IT team is simply too expensive when hospitals already struggle to afford basic supplies like vaccines.
I work in a medical environment where the doctors are using AI to assist in note taking. They ask consent at the beginning of the visit and 99% of people agree. They like to do it before going into their office so they can just leave the mic on and nothing gets missed fiddling with equipment. So I hear it as they go by. There's no hesitation.
Many of these people are highly suspicious of medical care, authority, the government. All kinds of wacky conspiracy theories going around. Yet nobody bats an eye when asked if their intimate conversation can be recorded and verbatim transcribed to be processed on a remote server. Due to high rates of acceptance among doctors and subsequently their patients, it is on track to be integrated into the computer system.
Other facilities are using similar software but not obtaining consent. I don't know if the doctors are supposed to but lax about it, or maybe you agree to it in some kind of blanket waiver when you obtain care.
I think in a lot of places you'd have a difficult and uphill battle to get a legal finding that the sound of heart beats would be considered confidential. If you got home and had adverts as a result of it, it would have to be because the facility provided your contact info with it, which isn't what's at issue here. Also, if you had a heart attack, you will end up being cared for in a cardiology unit. They don't really need the sound of your heart to infer cardiac issues if you are on a cardiac unit. Can probably just use location data like GPS, call towers and wifi hotspot collection to do so already.
But you are correct that this will never see application in low-resource situations. It's a pointless idea. If you don't have someone who is skilled enough to listen to the heart, then you don't have anyone skilled enough to to treat the problems that could arise. This will be a gizmo for rich worried well people.