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Our technology

Learn more about our AI

Our AI, developed by our team of research scientists, engineers and healthcare professionals, is a suite of AI tools designed around a doctor’s brain to provide accessible healthcare for millions. A number of these tools are modular, so they can be standalone and used in isolation, or combined to suit different requirements. We’re working with partners, from governments and foundations, to businesses and pharmaceuticals, to tech companies and telcos, tailoring our platform to meet their specific needs.

What our AI does

We’ve designed our AI tools to empower people with knowledge of their health, with the goal of relieving pressure on clinicians. It mimics the way a doctor operates, performing some of the cognitive tasks they carry out.

  • Perceive

    Our AI can efficiently read, comprehend, and learn from anonymized, aggregated, and medical datasets—when patients give consent for us to use their health information.

  • Triage

    It can use data in order to decide on, and provide information about, the likely causes for people’s symptoms. It then suggests possible next steps, including treatment information. It can let you know about general risks for certain conditions, when comparing user-inputted information and generally available data.

  • Simulate

    It can suggest future potential outcomes when comparing user-inputted information against generally available data. It can also provide general lifestyle advice and wellness tips to nudge behavioral change and reduce the likelihood of future illness.

  • Learn

    It learns with every experience, meaning it has the potential to get more accurate and make interactions more personalized over time. Each component of our AI reinforces the next, creating a continuous learning loop.

How it works

Our AI revolves around four main parts - the knowledge base, the comprehensive health record, the probabilistic graphical model, and simulations.

  • Knowledge base

    Central to our AI is a form of digital encyclopedia of medicine (our knowledge base) that contains the definitions, characteristics and relationships of certain diseases, symptoms and treatments. It contextualizes this information with a graphical representation that shows the relationships between the medical components.

  • The comprehensive health record

    This holds all of the available information about our individual users, when they give consent for us to use their health information. The record includes their medical history and consented data gathered through interacting with Babylon. It helps us make connections between users and different types of conditions, and their likely progressions over time when compared against generally available data.

  • Probabilistic graphical model

    This uses the knowledge from our digital encyclopedia, combined with all the data to test different models about certain illnesses. It is capable of processing millions of combinations of symptoms, diseases, and risk factors per second to help identify conditions which may match the information entered. A similar approach is also used to predict disease risks over the next five years when compared against generally available data.

  • Simulations

    Simulations are used to estimate ‘what-if’ scenarios, to predict what happens if people continue their routines for diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. It helps users understand the impact of their actions and helps us develop optimized care plans for them.

We’re part of the community

We contribute to the AI community by publishing papers, speaking at conferences and open-sourcing some of our work for the benefit of all.

See all our past papers