Artificial Intelligence in the Indian Medical Sector

Regulatory Sandboxes for Artificial Intelligence: Techno-Legal Approaches for India, ISAIL-TR-002

growth in use of artificial intelligence in the Indian space sector has been rapid.

Artificial Intelligence in the Indian Medical Sector

As of today, healthcare systems across the globe, although developing rapidly, are however struggling with ever-increasing costs, which is making easy access to healthcare systems and cures harder than already was to the general public.47 Thus, in order to aid this situation, artificial intelligence technologies have been recommended in the medical sector which will not only aim to simplify the lives of patients, doctors, and the hospital administrators, but it would simultaneously also assist in speeding up the healthcare process all in all in only a fraction of the prior cost involved in the relevant processes. In this view, many scholars had already predicted the use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry due to its significant achievements in the era of information technology, thus landing its positive influence in the medical sector.48

Since artificial intelligence technologies are able to mimic the usual human mind’s cognitive functions through general processes of machine learning and data input, the healthcare industry has already started experiencing a paradigm shift with a larger availability of healthcare and rapid progress of analytics techniques.49 Healthcare services, which are thus supported by artificial intelligence algorithms, will be able to revolutionise the medical treatment processes in the country in a way which has not been tried and tested before. This, however, although aided in providing creative solutions, it also opened the pathway of

May 2018) <https://www.un-spider.org/news-andevents/news/new-monitoring-system-strengthens-forestconservation-india> accessed 07 March 2022. 47 Eric J. Topol, ‘High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence’ (2019) Nature Medicine 25(1). 48 Rehab Rayan, ‘Artificial Intelligence Perspective on Healthcare’ (2019) ICEAT. 49 Fei Jiang, Hui Zhi, et. al., ‘Artificial intelligence in healthcare: past, present and future’ (2017) Stroke and Vascular Neurology 2.

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unprecedented opportunities and potentials never realised before in the healthcare industry.

Moreover, technologies powered by artificial intelligence are fuelled by the largely available clinical data and accelerated advancement of analytics systems, all of which is done 102 times faster than a usual human’s cognitive abilities. Not only healthcare professionals, but data scientists, clinical entrepreneurs, policymakers, and others, also believe artificial intelligence technologies to be able to take the medical sector to a new level of productivity.

However, one of the notorious sides of artificial intelligence which is worth mentioning is the ‘black-box nature of artificial intelligence algorithms’ which contribute to making opaque and untraceable decision-making processes of the respective mechanisms.50 This black-box nature of the artificial intelligence algorithms has proven to be a challenge especially in the healthcare industry wherein all decision-making processes need to be transparent and accountable for. Although artificial intelligence algorithms cannot be completely depended upon by professionals involved in the healthcare sector due to obvious issues of traceability of decision-making, technology powered by artificial intelligence has already proven its big role in the future since its start of advent in impacting electronic health records, diagnosis, treatment protocol development, patient monitoring and care, robotic surgery, health system management, as well as personalised healthcare assistance.51

The potential of use in artificial intelligence technologies in the Indian medical sector is multifold. The potential of these technologies have been seen for cancer screening, tuberculosis diagnosis, diabetic retinopathy screening, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease diagnosis and management, other similar disease detections and for improving the speed and quality of

50 Anastasiya Kiseleva, ‘AI as a Medical Device: Is It Enough to Ensure Performance Transparency and Accountability in Healthcare?’ (2019) European Pharmaceutical Law Review 1. 51 Desai Mparak & Seema Shah, ‘Artificial Intelligence Technology Role in the Healthcare Industry’ (2020) International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management.

Regulatory Sandboxes for Artificial Intelligence: Techno-Legal Approaches for India, ISAIL-TR-002

healthcare and medical services in India.52 There have been several examples of artificial intelligence research based projects which are funded by Indian Government initiatives such as the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Task Force in 2017, NITI Aayog’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and the International Centre for Transformative Artificial Intelligence which focus on research projects of potential uses of artificial intelligence in several Indian sectors including the Indian medical sector.53

In 2019, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence to develop artificial intelligence based solutions for supporting the National Tuberculosis Programme that aims at fighting tuberculosis at an Indian national level.54 The NITI Aayog has partnered with Microsoft and Forus Health to develop an artificial intelligence tool for early detection of diabetic retinopathy.55 Microsoft and Apollo Hospitals have partnered with each other to develop cardiology in India with the use of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has been used by the Indian Government during the pandemic as well. This is evident from the use of artificial intelligence chatbot on the MyGov portal to spread awareness and resolve queries of the general public in respect of the coronavirus pandemic.56 The Defence Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune, a Gurgaon based startup company called Staqu and the Norway India Partnership Initiative have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to create artificially intelligent coronavirus detection tools. A company called Milagrow HumanTech has developed an artificially intelligent robot called Milagrow iMap 9 and Garuda Aerospace has

52 Nirupam Bajpai and Manisha Wadhwa, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare in India’ (Centre for Sustainable Development: Earth InstituteColumbia University, January 2020) <Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare in Indiahttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu › download> accessed 07 March 2022. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

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developed an artificially intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle called Corona- Killer 100 which autonomously carry out disinfection related activities.57 Leading multinational tech companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft have partnered with several leading Indian hospital groups such as Fortis, Apollo and Narayana to develop artificial intelligence systems for effective hospital management, disease prediction, disease detection and delivering medical services in remote areas.58 Hospital groups such as Manipal Hospitals have been using the power of artificial intelligence for providing customer services through artificially intelligent chatbots.59 Looking at the several use cases, it can be seen that the application of artificial intelligence in the Indian medical sector continues to grow.

Artificial Intelligence in the Indian Automobile Industry

The introduction of artificial intelligence in today’s realm has led the technology today towards a significantly different output, especially concerning the automotive industry. The automotive industry now provides a choice to concerned human beings to self-drive automobiles.60 In this regard, on the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, despite a significant amount of loss, artificial intelligence infused market has allowed India to create its first SUV whose spine is practically made of an artificial intelligence driven technology.61 Most Indian manufacturers in this regard, in the automobile vehicle industry are aiming to have a visionary approach, MG Motors being one of them. The use of artificially intelligent driven technologies has resulted in a

57 Ibid. 58 Claire Munoz Parry and Dr. Urvashi Aneja, ‘Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare: Insights from India’ (Chatham House, 30 July 2020) <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/07/artificial-intelligencehealthcare-insights-india-0/3-ai-healthcare-india-applications> accessed 07 March 2022. 59 Ibid. 60 Gaurav Gupta, ‘Use of AI in the automotive industry’ (TOI, 12 February 2022) <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/use-of-ai-in-theautomotive-industry/> accessed 28 February 2022. 61 Ibid.

Regulatory Sandboxes for Artificial Intelligence: Techno-Legal Approaches for India, ISAIL-TR-002

satisfying value chain which caters to the needs of the manufactures, developers, as well as the end users, by making the overall service a predictive venture which ensures success in 97% of the cases. This is mainly through the amalgamated systems of driver risk assessment and driver assessment technologies imbibed within the artificially intelligent technologies.

In this regard, the system of artificial intelligence technologies assists the manufacturers, i.e., the designers and the product developers of automobile vehicle industries to tailor products that are most probably going to satisfy the end-users by carefully analysing and applying the user data it has learnt over its course of time.62 Thus, by relying on the artificially intelligent entities, creative manufacturers like the developers and the designers can add in their flair into their products by adding or subtracting the elements and features that may be present in a consumer’s dream car.63 Interestingly, if such artificially intelligent driven technologies keep assisting manufacturers today, Artificial intelligence powered robots will take over the automobile industry or the factory and need a workforce of other artificial intelligence entities along with constant human supervision to create quick and creative solutions almost always resulting in success. Furthermore, by predicting future maintenance and insurance costs and services, it has aided in Globalisation 5.0 after transforming the automobile industry in the country.

Use case examples include Indian automobile giant Tata partnering with Microsoft to harness artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data analytics for providing advanced navigation and remote vehicular monitoring features.64 The

62 Vinay Sanghi, ‘AI Is Changing The Auto Industry For The Better’ (Business World, 9 January 2022) <https://www.businessworld.in/article/AI-Is-Changing-The-AutoIndustry-For-The-Better-/09-01-2022-417123/> accessed 28 February 2022. 63 Ibid. 64 Sri Krishna, ‘AIM Long Reads: India’s Answer to AI- Powered Vehicles- More Safer, Cleaner, Reliable, and Affordable’ (Analytics India Magazine, 14 February 2022) <https://analyticsindiamag.com/aimlong-reads-indias-answer-to-ai-powered-vehicles-more-safer-cleanerreliable-and-affordable/> accessed 07 March 2022.

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