End-of-life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help?

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates—the people who have to make challenging medical choices on behalf their loved ones. Friends or family members may disagree over what’s best, which can lead to distressing situations. What if we could make these decisions easier? In this edition of What’s Next in Tech, learn about a potential AI-based tool that can help surrogates predict what the patients themselves would want.

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Ethicists say a “digital psychological twin” could help doctors and family members make decisions for people who can’t speak themselves.

A few months ago, a woman in her mid-50s—let’s call her Sophie—experienced a hemorrhagic stroke. Her brain started to bleed. She underwent brain surgery, but her heart stopped beating.

Sophie’s ordeal left her with significant brain damage. She was unresponsive; she couldn’t squeeze her fingers or open her eyes when asked, and she didn’t flinch when her skin was pinched. She needed a tracheostomy tube in her neck to breathe and a feeding tube to deliver nutrition directly to her stomach, because she couldn’t swallow. Where should her medical care go from there?

This difficult question was left, as it usually is in these kinds of situations, to Sophie’s family members. But the family couldn’t agree. Sophie’s daughter was adamant that her mother would want to stop having medical treatments and be left to die in peace. Another family member vehemently disagreed and insisted that Sophie was “a fighter.” The situation was distressing for everyone involved, including Sophie’s doctors.

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting. David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial-intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what patients themselves would want in any given situation.

The tool hasn’t been built yet. But Wendler plans to train it on a person’s own medical data, personal messages, and social media posts. He hopes it could not only be more accurate at working out what the patient would want, but also alleviate the stress and emotional burden of difficult decision-making for family members.

Wendler, along with bioethicist Brian Earp at the University of Oxford and their colleagues, hopes to start building the tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won’t be simple. Critics wonder how such a tool can ethically be trained on a person’s data, and whether life-or-death decisions should ever be entrusted to AI. Read the story.

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Image: Stephanie Arnett / MIT Technology Review | Getty Images