Self-service CarePods touted as ‘first AI doctor’s office’ — for $99/month

A computer might cure your ills soon enough.

The latest breakthrough in artificial intelligence is set to revamp the medical industry according to a company that is rolling out “the world’s first AI doctor’s office” slated for New York and other major U.S. cities come 2024.

CarePod is a self-service cube where patients can be screened for issues relevant to diabetes, hypertension, and depression and anxiety, according to its maker, Forward. The high-tech health stops will be installed in malls, gyms and offices.

Diagnostics from scans are then integrated into a program Forward is designing called Health Apps. Memberships are priced at a monthly $99.

“It basically loads up a bunch of different apps for you to play with,” Forward CEO and founder Adrian Aoun CEO told Axios.

“Let’s say you choose the body scan app … This is pretty cool. It’s like, ‘Please stand still,’ and then it rotates you in a circle, takes a whole bunch of readings, shows you those readings on the screen, explains them to you.”

For heart health, the cube will hand users a sensor for them to hold over their hearts as results emerge in real-time, according to the CEO.

In addition, the company said CarePods offer technology for users to draw their own blood.

In a demonstration, Aoun, a former AI bigwig at Google, touted the process as seemingly painless.

Boasting that there’s “no needle, there’s no knife, and nothing hurts right now,” the process instead uses a tiny vacuum chamber to suction a small amount of blood from patients’ arms by way of “capillary blood draw.”

Aoun claimed the two- to four-minute process is closer to that of a “leech or hickey” rather than standard finger pricks.

The company has not disclosed the manufacturer of the blood-draw technology, nor whether it needed or received approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

“You’re never going to scale doctors and nurses to the whole planet,” Aoun said while discussing CarePods. “So instead we said, ‘Well, instead of health care being a service, maybe we should rebuild health care as a product.’”

Down the line, the company expects CarePods to screen for advanced cancers and prenatal care and do polygenic analysis on a person’s pre-dispositioned risks for certain illnesses.

The first three care pods are to be installed in Sacramento, California, Chandler, Arizona, and Chicago’s Willis Tower.

Following that, they will expand to the San Francisco Bay Area, NYC and Philadelphia.

“Maybe we should take every single thing that doctors and nurses are doing and just slowly but surely try and migrate it over to hardware and software,” he added.

“We’re just going to keep going until we can deliver all this awesomeness for pennies on the dollar for the whole planet.”