Can Autonomous Healthcare Slow Antibiotic Resistance Down? – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 7th June 2025, 02:05 am

When we write about machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies here, it’s usually for cars. Tesla’s FSD Supervised Beta (or whatever it’s called these days) gets a lot of the attention, as do Waymo and other robotaxi providers. But, if we focus only on autonomous vehicles, we miss out on many exciting and even groundbreaking developments in the AI space.

Human health is a HUGE part of every environmental story, and recent news from LightAI shows us how AI technology can lead the charge in protecting not only human health from an environmental catastrophe, but animals as well.

The Problem: The Wrong Drug At The Wrong Time

Around the world, over 600 million people catch strep throat. Because it hurts so bad, we all want relief as quickly as possible. So, we all do our best to get in touch with a doctor to not only get pain medication and cough syrup, but something to make the problem go away ASAP. Usually, this means a course of antibiotics.

The bad news? We usually don’t actually need antibiotics because we don’t have strep. Despite years of medical schools and years more training on the job, doctors still misdiagnose some other throat ailment about 70% of the time. This unnecessary taking of antibiotics leads to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs that can eventually more easily kill just about any living thing on the planet.

One Solution: AI-Assisted Diagnosis

LightAI’s founder, Peter Whitehead, was already known for developing VELscope, a tool that has helped with over 50 million oral cancer exams. Now, he’s working on promoting a new smartphone-based tool for better diagnosing strep throat. Best of all, it uses hardware we already have in our pockets on a daily basis, so the best tool for the job is already everywhere.

This technology can do a lot more than just diagnose a sore throat. There are myriad other health conditions that smartphone imaging and AI recognition could be used to better diagnose. As the smartphone industry shifts away from wellness tracking toward more refined medical diagnosis that the medical industry missed out on with the smartphone revolution, this could make the company an attractive target for acquisition by big players like Google, Apple, and Amazon.

Paths To Market

Having a great technology and getting it out there for people to benefit from are two very different things. Fortunately, LightAI’s team knows this and is working on several different ways forward. These include:

• Direct-to-consumer: an app that allows users to self-screen without any need for FDA approval
• Emerging Markets: Focusing on low-resource regions where this app and others like it can serve as a force multiplier where there are already not enough healthcare professionals
• Regulatory Approval: Go through the normal clinical trial process (already underway with Carelon, part of Elevance Health)

If the company can succeed in getting to market, it will be able to seriously transform the healthcare industry. The need for rapid, accurate, and accessible medical diagnosis is self-evident, as is the need to take antibiotic resistance head-on.

By Jennifer Sensiba.

*This article sponsored by New Era Publishing.