Artificial intelligence in clinical practice: Implications for physiotherapy education

About 200 years ago the invention of the steam engine triggered a wave of unprecedented development and growth in human social and economic systems, whereby human labour was either augmented or completely supplanted by machines. The recent emergence of artificially intelligent machines has seen human cognitive capacity enhanced by computational agents that are able to recognise previously hidden patterns within massive data sets. The characteristics of this technological advance are already influencing all aspects of society, creating the conditions for disruption to our social, economic, education, health, legal and moral systems, and which may have a more significant impact on human progress than did the steam engine. As this emerging technology becomes increasingly embedded within devices and systems, the fundamental nature of clinical practice will evolve, resulting in a healthcare system that may require concomitant changes to health professions education. Clinicians in the near future will find themselves working with information networks on a scale well beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp, thereby necessitating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse and interpret the complex interactions of data, patients and the newly-constituted care teams that will emerge. This paper describes some of the possible influences of AI-based technologies on physiotherapy practice, and the subsequent ways in which physiotherapy education will need to change in order to graduate professionals who are fit for practice in a 21st-century health system.