AI and EOL: Can We Create a "Digital Twin" for End of Life Decisions?

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates, the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person, says David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health. Wendler 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.

Jessica Hamzelou writes in Technology Review about the the possibility of using the medical data, personal messages, and social media posts of a patient who is unable to communicate a decision to help family members understand what the person at the end of life would have wanted.

Around 34% of people in a medical setting are considered to be unable to make decisions about their own care for various reasons. They may be unconscious, for example, or unable to reason or communicate. This figure is higher among older individuals—one study of people over 60 in the US found that 70% of those faced with important decisions about their care lacked the capacity to make those decisions themselves. “It’s not just a lot of decisions—it’s a lot of really important decisions,” says Wendler. “The kinds of decisions that basically decide whether the person is going to live or die in the near future.”

This just underscores the importance of communicating with family when everyone is healthy. While no one can really anticipate what they will or would want, just the experience of discussing it will make everyone feel more comfortable making those decisions when the time comes.