IBM's Watson moves from Jeopardy to pharmacy assistant

Although IBM's Pulse event is billed as the premier service management event, the interesting aspects of day one weren't really the product news announcements.

IBM rolled out monitoring products to help organisations such as utilities firms and the healthcare industry improve their network, equipment and facilities management. But the more interesting aspect was the references to how IBM's super machine Watson could impact the world outside of TV game show Jeopardy.

Last month, Watson took on two Jeopardy champions and came out victorious, helped along by its 3,000 core processors, 15TB of data and 80 trillion instructions per second.

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software & Systems, explained that the key challenge in the 'Watson adventure' was the lack of an internet connection and no limit in the topics for questions. Hence applying Watson's capabilities to a specific industry would be a much easier task.

"The Watson domain was literally endless," he said. "Healthcare is relatively small compared to what we had to do for Watson."

Mills gave the example of a pharmacist who could use the data crunching technology behind Watson to offer a better patient service, running analysis to recommend a generic cheaper medicine than the normal prescription and checking this against other medicines being taken.

"We see what we did with Watson as an obvious way to create a pharmacist assistant," Mills said. "An assistant that doesn't get tired or emotional, and doesn't walk out the door and quit."

Mills added that IBM was already embarking on healthcare projects based on Watson, but declined to comment on any costs involved. Based on the computing power behind the machine, it's fair to assume this would be a hefty outlay, so CIOs in most organisations will likely have a long wait before they get their hands on the technology.

01 Mar 2011