Research pick: A smart approach to health - "Is Google making us smart? Health self-management for high performance employees and organisations"

It has often been suggested that search engines are making us stupid. With so much information, and disinformation, at our fingertips, are we inclined to simply seek and search rather than analyse and learn? Researchers in the have flipped this notion, with a particular focus on personal healthcare and the academic wing of the most well-known search engine, Google Scholar. Writing in the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, the team suggests that by bringing artificial intelligence tools into the frame, search engines could actually help make us smarter not dumber.

Luuk P.A. Simons, Mark A. Neerincx, and Catholijn M. Jonker of the Faculty of Computer Science at Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands, refer to an infamous article from 2008 in The Atlantic magazine entitled “Is Google making us stupid?”. In it, the technology, business, and culture writer Nicholas Carr, provocatively suggested that browsing for information was a suboptimal approach to reading and acquiring knowledge. Opinion has waxed and waned in the many years since.

Now, the Delft team hopes that we are mature enough to recognise that there are problems with blithely relying on search engine results without applying the skills of critical thinking. They also suggest that the use of hybrid AI in combination with a search engine such as Google Scholar might empower us. The researchers have focused on the notion of health self-management for employees that offers empowerment over medicalisation of illness. They suggest that for high-performance companies seeking the best from their employees, such an approach to healthcare might, in many cases, lead to increased productivity, resilience, and agility in the organisation’s teams. The approach might also improve the health of the workforce, especially when one considers the rising average age of employees in many sectors.

The hybrid AI approach to using Google Scholar for personal healthcare might, the team suggests, help users cope with the more than half a million new health-related documents published every year. They have home in on two particularly common health problems – high blood pressure (hypertension) and type-2 diabetes – both of which can be managed and even reversed to some degree with lifestyle changes. Earlier research has often shown that many people value the potential to have more control over their own health especially when faced with potentially debilitating health conditions.

“For diseases of affluence, if ‘health is what happens between doctors’ visits’, the AI support system proposed here may offer us a cheaper, more effective channel to deliver future healthcare,” the team concludes.

Simons, L.P.A., Neerincx, M.A. and Jonker, C.M. (2022) ‘Is Google making us smart? Health self-management for high performance employees and organisations’, Int. J. Networking and Virtual Organisations, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp.200–216.