Rowe, M., Nicholls, D. A., & Shaw, J. (2021). How to replace a physiotherapist: Artificial intelligence and the redistribution of expertise. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice.
I’m really excited to finally share this article that I’ve been working on for a couple of years with David Nicholls and Jay Shaw. I say a couple of years because even though we were finished with it in early 2020, the reviewers thought otherwise. Such is life.
Anyway, I’m quite proud of it and wanted to mark it with a post here. Here’s the abstract:
The convergence of large datasets, increased computational power, and enhanced algorithm design has led to the increased success of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) across a wide variety of healthcare professions but which, so far, have eluded formal discussion in physiotherapy. This is a concern as we begin to see accelerating performance improvements in AI research in general, and specifically, an increase in competence within narrow domains of practice in clinical AI. In this paper we argue that the introduction of AI-based systems within the health sector is likely to have a significant influence on physiotherapy practice, leading to the automation of tasks that we might consider to be core to the discipline. We present examples of some of these AI-based systems in clinical practice, specifically video analysis, natural language processing (NLP), robotics, personalized healthcare, expert systems, and prediction algorithms. We address some of the key ethical implications of these emerging technologies, discuss the implications for physiotherapists, and explore how the resultant changes may challenge some long-held assumptions about the status of the profession in society.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t make a plan to publish the article in an open access format, which is my fault because I just assumed that we would pay the APC to make this happen. However, I didn’t realise that Physiotherapy Theory and Practice charge 3000 USD to publish an open-access article. And no discount for South African authors. As I say, it’s my own fault for not checking the APC before we submitted but who’d have thought it was that much. I’ll obviously never submit to PTP again. Oh, and OpenPhysio is an open-access physiotherapy journal that changes nothing for authors and nothing for readers.
Anyway, if you’re interested in reading this article but don’t have an institutional subscription to the journal, let me know and I’ll email you a copy.
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Comments
2 responses to “How to replace a physiotherapist (or any professional, really)”
Hi Marianne. I completely get the reaction that sees this as a threat. My own perspective is that this is coming regardless of personal preference, and that this is an opportunity to rethink what we want the profession to be. I hope that we can use this to prepare the next generation of therapists for a world that is quite different to the one we live in. We have a tendency to position human interaction as some kind of peak experience but we say that our teaching must be student-centred, and that professional practice must be patient-centred. But what if machines do student- and patient-centred better than us?
My first reaction to your post was hhmmmm – interesting, haven’t given this much thought, but I am ok…its the next generation’s concern…. However, I take that back very quickly. Thanks for the heads-up and reminder this is a real possibility – not necessarily a threat, but something we need to consider urgently so that we can spend more time on that part of being a physio – the human interaction – that (hopefully) AI will not replace.