Here is an example of a cognitive app that’s just over the horizon. Imagine you’re a farmer in Iowa or in sub-Saharan Africa. You’re out in the field working and your 10-year-old daughter comes running to you and says, “Dad, something bit me but I don’t know what.” You take a picture of the bite on your smartphone, and send it to the cognitive cloud. There it gets processed and tells you there’s a 92 percent chance that it’s a spider bite, and a 47 percent chance it’s a snake bite. It displays the triage information on how to manage a spider bite along with a map to the nearest doctor. It also gives you the doctor’s telephone number, and asks if you’d like the phone to place the call.
This is an example of democratizing medical knowledge at the point of care. To make it possible, you need content in the cloud, you need the cloud itself to process the content and understand it, and you need a mobile device manufacturer.
There’s a role for entities that bring these parties together. Deloitte is doing that with its greenhouses. IBM is also doing this with its BlueMix Garages that were announced in April. Cognitive Scale and other startups are also spearheading a lot of these partnerships.
