Why Human-Centered AI Is the Future of Medicine & Mental Wellness

This episode is a little different from what we usually cover on New Frontiers, but it’s one I couldn’t wait to bring to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we—as clinicians—are supposed to keep up in this era of high-throughput technology. We’re swimming in data: labs, multi-omics, diet logs… and an ever-growing stream from wearables. There’s just so much coming at us, and too often, we’re awash in a sea of information without adequate interpretive power.

That’s why this conversation with Dr. Rana el Kaliouby felt so important. She’s not just an AI scientist—she’s a visionary and a total badass. She’s building technology that doesn’t just process data, but actually helps us become better clinicians and better humans. We get into the ethics, the potential, the parenting implications—and yes, a personal story about a tragedy in my own hometown that made this all hit very close to home. This one’s powerful, and I hope it sparks the same questions and inspiration for you as it did for me.

~DrKF

Trigger Warning

Content note: This episode touches on sensitive topics, including gun violence and suicide, in the context of empathy, mental health, and technology. If you or someone you know is struggling, please seek help. We share this with care and hope it offers support and perspective.

Why Human-Centered AI Is the Future of Medicine & Mental Wellness

Can emotionally intelligent AI improve clinical decision-making and human connection? In this episode of New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald interviews Dr. Rana el Kaliouby—AI scientist, entrepreneur, and pioneer in human-centric technology. They explore how AI and emotional intelligence can address today’s empathy crisis, enhance clinician effectiveness, and transform the future of AI in healthcare.

From emotionally intelligent technology that supports parent-child interaction to real-time data tools integrating labs, wearables, and multi-omics, Dr. el Kaliouby shares how human-centric AI is reshaping both medicine and daily life. If you’re navigating information overload or looking to adopt clinical decision support tools powered by AI, this conversation offers a practical and inspiring path forward.

In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: In this episode of New Frontiers, we are doing a deep dive into all things AI. Yes, there’s a good focus on healthcare, but we’re talking about AI in the context of so much more, its ability to shape humanity. And in so doing, over the course of this conversation, we cover some difficult topics, including gun violence and suicide. It may be triggering to some of you. Here’s my conversation with Rana el Kaliouby.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody, welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine and of course today is no exception. I am talking to Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, who is an Egyptian-American AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor. She is co-founder and managing partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, where she invests in startups building human-centric AI. She’s also the host of Pioneers of AI podcast. Prior to that, Rana founded her company, Affectiva, out of MIT, where she pioneered the field of emotion AI and successfully exited the company in 2021. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a post-doctorate from MIT.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Rana, it is such a pleasure to have you here with me today. We have so much to unpack. We have a mutual friend who introduced us and he gave me your background and it’s absolutely extraordinary, as people already heard in the bio. But just diving into your book, Girl Decoded, and learning your history, your story— and I know we’ll unpack some of it because it really informs what you’re doing today— just was deeply meaningful and moving for me. So where do we start with this? Why don’t we speak a little bit about your journey being an expert in AI, bringing in the human element. Your stake in the ground is bringing the humanity to artificial intelligence. What an extraordinary thing to take on.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Absolutely.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And informed in this journey is you being from Egypt, and now an Egyptian-American, and your experience there. Just this massive journey made you who you are today, bringing us this gift of arguing and holding the space for emotion in artificial intelligence. So take that giant open-ended question and just go ahead.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: First of all, it’s great to reconnect and be on the show with you. I’m so excited for our conversation. And I have to give a shout out to Brooke for making this introduction. I’ve been a big fan of you forever, and so I’m glad we’re having these conversations and exploring where our worlds intersect. I think they really do.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, and just being a woman, let me throw that in. It sort of went without saying, but I want to say it because that is a piece of where our worlds intersect. And certainly it’s a huge important part of your journey. So go.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I grew up in the Middle East. I’m originally from Egypt and both my parents were in technology. They actually met at a programming class, my dad was teaching the class. It’s an obsolete programming language at the moment, but that’s how they met and so I grew up in a household where we really encouraged to explore and be at the forefront of technology. I decided to study computer science as an undergraduate and really had— It’s kind of funny how the world works. I had a very well laid out plan for my career. I was going to go abroad, get a PhD and come back to Cairo and teach computer science. So sure enough, I got a PhD to go to Cambridge University and that really just opened my eyes to a whole new world of AI and technology and it was hard to put me back in the box.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: So I got to Cambridge and pioneered this field of artificial intelligence, which is bringing emotional intelligence to machines. And we can double click on that in a second. But it was my first experience being away from home. I was really homesick and I was only twenty at the time and I started to wonder, what if machines, what if technology could understand human emotions the way we do? And I embarked on this journey to bring humanity to technology. And at the end of my PhD, I very serendipitously met this MIT professor, Rosalind Picard, who invited me to join her group at MIT. So instead of going back to Egypt, I ended up in Boston and within the first couple of years, there was a commercial interest in the technology we were building at the time, kind of building on my PhD work. And we started the company and that kind of took me away from academia and into the world of startups and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s very, very interesting. And I’m assuming, because there wasn’t a lot of options out there, not a lot of people were thinking about bringing emotion into AI.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Not at all. In fact, it was really crazy because that was pre-smartphone. For a lot of the technology, the way it works is we use cameras to understand your facial expressions and then map it to an emotional state. So we’re able to detect if you’re smiling or if you look surprised and you’re raising your eyebrows and whatnot. And that was pre-smartphone. So it was super, super early.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What even gave you the idea? I mean, you’re over in Cambridge, you’re twenty, and it’s the first time you left home and you have this wildly sophisticated idea.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I have this mental image from that time. I was newly married, I was a young bride and my husband at the time, he’s my ex now, he was based in Cairo, so it was a long distance relationship. And I remember being homesick and kind of chatting with him on my laptop and just literally in tears and the best I could do was send a little emoji face with the two tears. And it just it made me wonder, like, wow, it turns out only 7% of how we communicate is in the choice of words we use. 93% is nonverbal and it’s split between your facial expressions, your hand gestures, your body posture, your vocal intonation. And it just hit me that when we communicate via text, all of that is lost, right? And I wanted to, in a very kind of oxymoron way, use computers to recapture these nonverbal signals.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Amazing. And it’s just extraordinary that being pre-smartphone, being away from home, that gave you this idea to create something that is incredibly essential going forward. And thank God that you got on it and you started. And I think you’re relatively far along and obviously there’s a recognized need by the fact that you were able to sell your technology successfully so, so quickly. You share in the book the first anecdote in Girl Decoded, the story of the 2017 Cocoa, Florida group of teens, just kind of illustrating the process of dehumanization that has happened across the electronic landscape that has taken us over. So, these teens—

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Actually why don’t you tell that story because you’ll say it better than I could, surely. And fold that into what you discovered at twenty, and what you started to work on, and what we need to be doing. We have to humanize technology, but then also, you know, what we’re up against and what we need to do.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. You know, this was true when I first started to do a lot of this research over 25 years ago, and I still think it’s true today. We are in an empathy crisis, right? And there’s a whole lot of reasons why we’ve ended up in an empathy crisis, but I think technology has dehumanized us in a way. And so this particular story was a group of teenagers, they were hanging out by a river and they saw a man drown and they pulled out their phones and they recorded the guy drowning and they didn’t call for help. They didn’t try to help and actually it was one of these teenager’s sisters who basically brought that story to light. It just– Yeah, it’s this dehumanization. How could they see this person and not try to intervene, but instead use their cameras to capture the moment.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: And in a way, this is still very true today. We’re more likely to be mean when we’re communicating over Twitter or text or Slack. And I think with AI and AI companions and co-pilots and AI friends, we’re going to start to see the moral fabric of our society really unravel unless we do something about it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And perhaps kids who are more submerged into technology, they haven’t had technology-free time as we did, or at least less technology time. There’s television and so forth. Perhaps there’s something that they’ve lost. Perhaps there’s a greater detachment from empathy. I mean, I was pondering that when I was reading your book and I thought, no, there’s certainly plenty of people our age on the internet being really mean, you know, really, really presenting as very detached from any kind of humanity. There is a certain challenge that kids have. So yeah, we’re at this risk of dehumanizing ourselves. Yeah, go ahead.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. Well, I think if you don’t use a muscle, it atrophies, right? And I think with a lot of these kids growing up around technology and smartphones and not learning to make eye contact and not learning to read all of the nuanced emotional expressions, you lose that. And that’s why I think it’s so important to build this emotional intelligence into machines. That’s why I encourage my kids, when you’re talking to Alexa or Siri, better be polite. You have to say please to ChatGPT, right? And thank you. Because that’s how you practice these skills.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, that’s so interesting. So, I just shared with you offline a little bit that ChatGTP is actually really quite epic at apologizing if you call it to task on a limitation. Has some of the work that you did informed that technology, OpenAI?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I would say indirectly, right? Like this idea that if you want to— You know, if you think about human intelligence, your IQ matters, but actually the best leaders, and the leaders that could motivate behavior change, have a lot of emotional intelligence. They have a lot of EQ, right? And we drew the same idea in technology— basically marrying the IQ of AI with the EQ of the AI. So you want ChatGPT to both be smart and intellectually accurate and whatnot, but you kind of want it to have a personality and apologize and empathize. And I think the more and more we spend time with AI, the more important it is going to be for these chatbots and avatars and whatnot to have this kind of emotional intelligence. Even robots, actually too.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, right. Gosh, okay, we’ll put a pin in that and we’ll circle back and talk about where we are in the world of robots. So what do we do? I mean, I’ll give you a basic example in chat that many of us have probably experienced. How do you see humanizing AI?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Gosh, I think at the very core of it, I really believe in this idea of human-centric AI. Whenever we’re building these technologies, we really ought to center it around what does it do for us as humans? Does it help you become healthier, happier, more connected, more productive, more knowledgeable? Like a better version of yourself. I really do believe there’s a version of the universe where AI is helping us become better versions of who we are, unlocking our potential for creativity and connection and love. And so that’s the world I want us to build. And there’s definitely a lot of startups and founders who are building AI in this very thoughtful and intentional way, but there’s also a lot of builders who don’t really think about the implications of AI on our humanity and our health and our mental health and our relationship health and emotional health.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, certainly in the earliest iterations, I mean, the way that we engage in relationship on Facebook or Instagram, I mean, there’s a real artificiality. Like, just a very unsatisfying element, with many false elements to it. I mean, it’s necessary and we’re in it and participating in it, but what you’ve just described is not exactly there in my experience.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: No. A lot of the social media platforms give you the illusion of a connection, but it’s not a real human connection. And I believe there are ways for technology to bring us closer to each other as opposed to this dehumanized, polarized, et cetera, which is the world we unfortunately live in.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, right, that allowed the kids in 2017 and so many, you know, myriad, myriad, myriad other examples. It’s an amazing vision that you’re putting forth, this idea that we could actually become more connected, better people, kinder, more willing to be our best selves and embrace that using technology. And as you admit in the book, interestingly, and I appreciate it, you start and end your day, basically, with your phone, with technology. Or at least you did when you wrote the book.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I still do, I still do.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, bravo you for admitting it and for recognizing that we can change it. It doesn’t have to be this damaging, soul gutting, bad habit. Talk a little bit, you know, just bring us a little bit more around Affectiva. This is your MIT business. What it was, where it’s gone, and then we can pivot and talk a little bit about where you’ve been since.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, so we started the company in 2009 when I joined MIT and started to get this commercial interest. So we spun out and our mission was to bring emotional intelligence to machines. And the way we did that is literally using a computer on your laptop or in your car or on your phone, we’re able to detect your facial expressions of emotion and help create better experiences. Very quickly— Actually the impetus for starting the company was autism. We worked a lot with kids on the autism spectrum to help them understand these nonverbal signals. But then we started to get a lot of interest from Fortune 500 companies who were like, wait, you could tell us how people are responding to our video ads or our movie trailers or TV shows. We want to know that. And so that became the first product we brought to market. It was a very profitable business.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: And then in 2016, 2017, all these car companies started to reach out because they wanted us to make the technology work in a car so that they could detect if a driver was texting while driving or kind of nodding and falling asleep. So that became the ultimate application and in 2021, we sold the company to a Swedish, publicly traded company that was very focused on the automotive driver monitoring application.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, so I sold the company in 2021 and I had to really take a step back. A lot of my personal identity was tied to Affectiva and I almost had an identity crisis. I was like, who am I now that I’ve sold the company? And I realized that I love innovation. I love that stage of an early stage company where you have deep conviction, you haven’t figured out the pieces of the puzzle. And I really wanted to go back to that and decided to start investing in AI companies. It was 2021, so it was a few months before ChatGPT came out and this kind of pivotal moment in AI and it hasn’t stopped since. So now I focus a lot of my time on investing in these early stage AI companies with this very particular thesis around human-centric AI.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What are some of the companies that are standouts? And is the needle moving in this human-centric approach? Is it influencing my world yet beyond having a car tell me to wake up or stop?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. I would say one of the areas that I’m most passionate about is how do we harness AI to advance health and wellness, which is, I believe where our worlds intersect. I think about it in terms of this trifecta of new types of sensors married with new types of multimodal data, longitudinal data— so data across time— and then harnessing both predictive AI, but also generative AI and I’m happy to define both. Would that be… Do you want me to?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Sure, that would absolutely be useful.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Okay, yeah. Predictive AI is basically the machine learning or AI that’s been around for, gosh, like 20 to 30 years. And it’s the idea that you have gobs and gobs of data and you can unleash these algorithms on the data to find patterns. And based on the data it’s seeing, it can predict future patterns. So that’s the predictive AI that we’ve had for a long time. It’s been commercialized in many companies and it’s the basis of, like, Google Maps and Alexa and Siri, right? What’s new, and that’s the pivotal point that happened with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, is this idea of generative AI. So it’s again, an AI algorithm that is unleashed on tons of data, but this time it can create new data based on this existing data. It can get creative. It can get generative. And that has really unlocked this idea of AI becoming a creative thought partner and a confidant and somebody you can work alongside with.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: And so for me, marrying both predictive AI, which I still think is really fascinating— And there’s a lot of innovation happening in that space with this idea of generative AI that can be creative. I think there’s a lot happening there, especially in the health and wellness space. I really track companies that are in the mental health space. That’s one of the areas I’m very passionate about, women’s health, and just health span in general.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I want to explore what you’re looking at there specifically, but just going back to your focus on bringing the human emotion in. I mean, is there a time when AI will be looking at us and recognizing our experience and feeding us back, or altering how it responds to us with that? I mean, there has to be. Other than just typing in, which, you know, your earlier point was 7% of the relevant aspect of communication.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, one of the companies I’m invested in is called Happypillar, and they use conversational AI to coach parents through play therapy sessions with their young kids. So it’s really like a behavioral health intervention for young families. And I love it because the phone’s sitting there, and, you know, not every family can afford to go to a therapist and also have the bandwidth and the time to do that. But with your phone listening into the conversation, it’s just five minutes a day. You have to start it, so it’s not always listening and spying on you. It sits there and it says, you didn’t give enough positive feedback or you weren’t excited enough or you weren’t even present enough, which sometimes my son calls me out on that. And I love it. It democratizes access to mental health support. So that’s one example.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. That’s very interesting. So it’s not actually looking, but it’s listening, you know, native in the environment.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Right, exactly. This particular one use case is just listening. But imagine if you’re prompting ChatGPT, and again, with your permission the camera is on and it says something and you’re like, right. And it’s like, oh, sorry. I clearly got that wrong. Yeah. So I think we’ll get there.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah. It seems to me that what you’re describing actually sounds like a possibility. I mean, it’s really a little bit mind-blowing. I feel, I don’t know, maybe, this hasn’t been on my radar. I think a lot of us have been very trepidatious about how we incorporate AI into our worlds and how we allow it to move us forward. And, well, there’s all sorts of concern and thinking about this within clinic practice, although there’s guardrails around all of that. Or you can make sure everything is HIPAA compliant and so forth. But just being really a little bit cloistered around using it, not recognizing whether it will be used ultimately nefariously or for making us better. Thoughts on that, actually?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. I mean, that goes back to this human-centricity, right? For example, one of the criteria I use when I look at startups and evaluate whether I would become an investor or not is whether they’re committed to the ethical development and deployment of AI, and so, some examples of that. Ethical development is, are you thinking about the data you’re using to train your algorithm? Are you thinking about the diversity of the data? Not just the quantity of it, but where are you getting it from? And is it truly representative of the plethora of humans who are going to use your product? And you’d be shocked at the number of startups who are not at all thinking about data and algorithmic bias. So that’s one.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: The other is a lot of these applications really deal with very private data, right? Whether it’s health data or… It’s just very private data a lot of the times. And again, are you committed to consenting people before you take that data and use it? Are you committed to data privacy and respecting people’s privacy? Are they getting value in return for sharing this very private data? I think it’s so important to have this ethics lens when we’re building these technologies and not tack it on at the end as an afterthought. Because by then it’s too late. So I try to encourage founders and I asked the founders if they’re thinking about this and if they’re not, I try to encourage them. And if I get the sense that they’re open and they’re really prioritizing thinking about these things, to me that’s usually a very green flag. But if they’re not, that’s not a good match for me as an investor.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And has the landscape changed at all? I imagine that initially it was devoid of it. I mean, it seems like you basically started this field with your work twenty plus years ago at Cambridge. I mean, is there a favorable movement towards the humanization of AI? Or is it still…

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: That is actually a good question. I would say there’s more recognition today that this is important. You know, there is a lot of dystopian views of AI, but I think to avoid that dystopian view, we have to have this human-centered approach and actually, world renowned institutions, like MIT and Stanford, have human-centered AI Institutes. Stanford has HAI, which is the Human-Centered AI Institute. And then MIT just announced a new program called AHA, Advancing Humans with AI. Both programs are centered around this idea that we can’t just obsess about the accuracy of these AI models. Like, if you Google, let’s compare ChatGPT to Gemini, which is Google’s AI platform, the results will all be focused on the accuracy of these models. Okay, great, that’s important, but what about the social and emotional aspects of these models as well? And so there’s a big movement towards creating these benchmarks for AI, which I’m excited about.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. And it seems like this conversation could be had outside of the actual centers building the technology, with leaders in other areas. Like religious leaders, or the government sort of goes without saying, it should be participating. But individuals who influence broad swaths of people elsewhere sort of having some thinking around this. But I think just the movement towards embracing that it’s a reality and with us and here to stay is sort of step one. But then, quickly on its heels should be this idea of humanizing it. It’s incredible. The idea that this technology could ultimately actually serve to make us better people is one that just strikes me as absolutely essential. Because I think a lot of us look at AI— And we’ll get to medicine because medicine is an incredible application of AI, which I’m in love with some of the work that’s happening over there. So I’m going to put a pin in that. But this more broad conversation, you know, we look at it as being yet another gutting of our soul, you know, another separation from our humanity. So getting this word out is important.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. Imagine in the field of technology and AI, we always look for KPIs to optimize building the algorithm for. Imagine if we came up with four or five KPIs around human flourishing. And as we build these new technologies, we’re optimizing for human flourishing. Now, human flourishing as a concept is pretty nebulous. It’s not like we can quantify it, but I think there’s an opportunity there. Can AI help us have better relationships as opposed to take away from our relationships? That’s an area where I think there’s huge potential. But these are definitely not the mainstream ideas. Yet.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: God, it just struck me as so important. I’m thinking, again, that story that you shared in the opener of your book and thinking about them as teenagers and just being detached from empathy. So detached. And then I think about being in the U.S. and how gun violence, you know, killing students… It’s such a massive thing. I mean, there’s a lot of really low hanging fruit happening in the US. You know, I’m from Sandy Hook. I mean, I just know the fallout of becoming a detached human. We see it in the US virtually every single day.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: And you know, what if technology was part of the solution, right? A lot of these young people, they’re on their computers and their phones all the time. Imagine if the phone could raise a red flag that this person is detached or depressed or anxious and help that person get help. Another company that I was on the board of is called Videra Health and they do just that. Basically, it’s an app where you can check in with a video interview and then they use natural language processing and AI and emotion AI to flag if a person needs help. And they have, in fact, helped a number of adolescents get just-in-time support who could have otherwise ended their lives or hurt other humans. So I really do think technology could be part of the solution.

zgerald: Or even built into the technology that the kids are addicted to. I know that the young man who lived near us and shot my neighbor’s daughter, it’s just beyond tragic.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: That’s tough… Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It very, very, very much hit every single person in our community. What if there was something built into the technology that he was on all the time, 24-7, that detected he was following a certain direction on it. And I don’t know where it would go from that, but he was on technology all of the time. That’s what we knew about him. You know, video games and so forth. What if there was some sort of a responsibility to incorporate some of the work that you’re doing into the things that kids are most addicted to? I mean, we could start solutions right there.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Absolutely. And that’s where this idea of predictive AI comes in. There’s telltale signs, right? And with enough examples, you can actually be able to be on the lookout. And again, we have to think about, okay, what do you do with this data? Who do you share it with? Who do you raise that flag to? Is it a parent? Is it an educator? I don’t know the answer to that, but the technology’s there and I agree with you, there’s an opportunity.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Huge opportunity. I mean, there’s a problem that we haven’t been able to correct at all, you know, when we look at a lot of the violence that happens in the U.S. I mean, we started to put print warnings on cigarettes and I think that actually did make a difference. We started to do some really pretty rudimentary things that made a difference in public health outcomes and this is a huge crisis, as you speak about in your book. Wow.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I am sorry that you had to experience that. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, I am too. All of us in our town did and the myriad other towns in the world, but especially in the US that have. But there is something that we can do. I’m just hearing in what you’re saying that there’s this extraordinary opportunity and it makes me feel much more positive towards it. I mean, I’ve got a seven-year-old at home who will be walking— Well, she already is on YouTube Kids and would stay on YouTube Kids all day long if she could. But I’ll be having this conversation and I’ll be thinking about this with her and sort of jockeying for control and how best to, you know, keep her a human.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Do you want to make a comment? We have to move into medical and I want to hear all about what you’re investing in and I want to turn our attention there. It’s important. We’re talking mostly to clinicians but there’s plenty of parents and you and I talked offline. I know you’re actively participating, I think, in your kids school around thinking about bringing AI and so share some of your thoughts

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, I’m on our school’s board. I got invited to join a couple of years ago to really think through like, how do we bring AI to education, right? And I definitely think the wrong approach is to basically ban it. Because AI is changing every aspect of our lives and the kids and the adults and the organizations that are going to be more AI forward will be in a better position to capitalize on this technology than people who don’t have any access to it. So I’m all for access, but I think we have to be very intentional about it.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: My approach with my kids— my daughter’s almost 22 and my son is 16. My son, I would say, is very AI curious. He likes to really try all the different tools and he’s just very AI forward. And so he and I have a lot of conversations about him not just being a consumer of this technology, but being a critical thinker. Like, where does it break down? Like, why did it answer this way? How is it programmed? What data gets fed into this algorithm? What questions to ask? And I think for our kids to use AI safely, they have to be critical of the technology. And yeah, so that’s been my approach as a parent. We really try to go behind the scenes and really kind of understand how these technologies work.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s amazing. Well, maybe your next offering will be in writing down or releasing some of your thoughts around how to do this. I’ll be heading there soon with my daughter.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Oh, I’ll make a note of that. Yeah, I will think about that.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, because he’s at an advantage, having you as a mom. And again, I’m going back to your book of Girl Decoded and your own emotional exploration to be able to build the data. You had to do a lot of inner work. I mean, it seems like an oxymoron, right? It seems like such a complete…

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: So true.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. So here you are developed emotionally. You put a lot of effort into becoming, you know, this emotionally open, kind of mature individual in your effort to build this AI technology. It’s amazing. So you’re well positioned to be guiding your son. So you have the backstory, you have the questions you need to ask, and the limitations you can think about. But I also know that you have a very amazing relationship, in real time, with your two humans at home. You have both of that. So God, what a gift if you would consider creating something like that to guide us all as we march forward. We went out to dinner last night, Isabella and I, and she was chit chatting on my phone to ChatGTP. Actually, she was doing her French lesson with Chat and it was just really funny. But, you know, there’s Chat in our world and in her world now. So, it’s upon us.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, these young kids are very comfortable around these technologies too. You know, I’ll never forget this— When my son was seven, I think he was in first grade. Would that be about seven? I brought a whole bunch of robots to his class. And adults are usually very skeptical and they don’t want to touch the thing and they want to be at arms length. And these kids were just so excited to interact with these robots and they wanted one at home and they wanted one to do math homework. So these kids are growing up being very AI native and we have to really think carefully about there’s a lot of positives around that, but also a lot of potential danger and we have to be careful about it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, and I don’t feel like I’m well equipped. I mean, right now, what she’s conversing with Chat on is innocent and it can be very beneficial. She says, are monsters real and Chat will talk about the myth and he’ll sort of go into this detailed response, which is nice. It’s actually helpful for her. She can confront some of her fears using Chat. Or talk about her French class and things like that. So, it’s been easy and kind of safe right now, the pond we’re in, but I could see that changing on dime and just being like, what do do with that? And our impulse is to just keep our kids from it. But we need to move forward. It’s informing us everywhere. So let me know if you take that on or invest in a company that does run with it. That would be awesome.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Okay, I love that you created that possibility now. That’s great.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, it’s so essential. You know, Peter Diamandis, you actually just spoke at his conference recently. I saw him, he did a keynote at A4M in 2023 that I was at, and it was super. He’s so inspirational. He just really paints the big giant picture and it’s very exciting and it’s very motivating. In 2023, he said, and it would be interesting to see how he’s evolved, but he said, look, if you’re not actively using AI, if AI is not informing your world— and he was speaking to us as clinicians— you will be left behind. You absolutely will be left behind. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist. Like, you have to get on this. This has to be a part of your world. And that was very sticky for me. It still informs my thinking today as I see how I’m using it and wonder if I’m using it sufficiently in my medical practice.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You know, there’s BrainKey, the AI-informed brain MRI company that I’m incredibly excited about and refer appropriate patients to use that. I find it incredible, it’s game changing what we can understand about what’s happening in real time with the brain using what they’ve developed at BrainKey. And Cleerly with their ability to look at the transition of plaque from soft and highly dangerous to the calcified. It’s game changing for me in my practice. Of course I have AI taking the rough chart note. I still have to go in there and spend a lot of time. Hopefully we’ll have AI incorporated, in the not so distant future, into pulling our lab data together and kind of collating it and organizing it over time, which in functional medicine is just a nightmare. But there hasn’t been any technology that’s met our needs yet.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I think that’s a huge opportunity by the way. If somebody’s doing this, I would love to invest. Call to action. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, because there’s just a ton of data and we’re in this era, you know, high throughput technology where we can get millions of data points, but then you’re awash in a sea of data without adequate interpretive power. And, you know, multi-omics. So there’s just massive amounts of data that needs to be crunched. Yeah, and in the start of my career, this was all done in our heads. And still, to your point, a lot of it is. A lot of it we’re still hanging on to basically and hoping for the best, in our chart notes, that we’re capturing the important variables and we’re going to be able to really give the best care to our patients because we haven’t found it yet. But that’s how I’m using AI.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And then of course I use Chat and then there’s a research AI that I’ll use sometimes, asking scientific questions, but it’s still at the periphery of what I’m doing. So, speak to that. And the wearables. In the clinic practice, bringing wearable data isn’t there yet for us. Parking the wearable data we get from our patients and having that inform our clinical decision making isn’t there yet. So for me, for us in our clinic practice, it’s still kind of messy. And so I’ll be thinking about what Peter said back in 2023 and like, what do I need to be doing as a clinician? How do I need to really be harnessing this full tilt?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. First of all, it sounds like you’re doing great because you are leaning in, right? You’re leaning in and things are moving really fast. There’s always new technologies coming out and it’s kind of hard to keep track even for somebody who’s breathing AI every day. But a few thoughts. I’m actually very excited about this vision of a health co-pilot where it has access to all of my wearables. Whether I’m wearing a Whoop, or a ring, or a continuous glucose monitor, or I don’t know, like this company Nix Biosensors that I’m an investor in their hydration intelligence patch. So they’ll kind of measure the chemistry of your sweat to tell you…

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, wow.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, she’s awesome by the way, the founder, Meridith Cass, if you wanted to ever interview her. But they can break down and tell you what electrolytes are missing from your sweat. But today all of these sensors are disparate and they don’t talk to each other. And it’s a nightmare to bring all this data together to give you a holistic picture of your health and your wellness, right?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: And then add on top of that amazing clinicians like you who have incredible expertise in functional medicine. How do we capture your brain, you know, and AI-ify it so that we can scale your expertise? And there’s a few companies that are in the space, also a woman founder, Rya Health is the company’s name and Jennifer Heil is the CEO. They’re trying to bring experts like you and build digital twins of that expertise and make that available to millions and millions of humans. So, we’re in the early days of all of this kind of coming together, but it will happen because the individual pieces are getting there. We just now need a platform that pulls it in in a seamless way, more of like an iPhone moment, which we have not had in AI yet. It’s still not mainstream enough, but we will get there.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, like the unifier that will really bring it. And then once we have that foundational tool, we can go in and refine and tweak and improve. Because we see lab data improve, we see CGM data, we see the Oura ring, over time, is improving, and so it can happen within that structure. But yeah, now it’s pretty disparate. That sounds very interesting. I mean, what is your gut, you know, just having your finger on the pulse of these emerging technologies of when we’ll have something like that in clinical practice? Any clinician listening is paying attention right now. Big time. What’s your prediction for this?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I honestly think the pieces are there. I think we’re not that far out from seeing this happen. I think we’re going to see this happen in the next couple of years. And then you can layer on things like agentic AI. So AI agents are like AI chatbots, but they can actually get tasks done on your behalf. So now you can have a team of these AI agents where you can delegate tasks to and you can ask it to, I don’t know, book doctor appointments on your behalf, or tell you to build a schedule for your supplements, right? And order the right supplements at the right time. I think we’re going to start to see those too because the underlying technology is here. It’s going to take a bold visionary founder.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, to put this all together.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So I’m in Mexico now, but I’ll be in the US in a couple of months and I’ll bang out some labs. I’ll do some odds and ends there regarding my medical care that I’m familiar with doing there and then I do some here. But God, to just have that managed by AI, to have somebody just take care of calling that. What an incredible thing. How are we going to layer in using AI for therapy? Into how we’re thinking clinically? Using AI to help with the coaching element? What are your thoughts around that? By the way, I’m just…

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Actually, let me say this, folks, all of what Rana’s mentioned, the companies, we’ll find their websites. We’re going to harvest everything and put them in the show notes because I know that you’ll want to go there and check them out. In fact, I want to go there and check out what she’s mentioned thus far as well. So we’ll get as much as we can and we’ll put it in the show notes so you can go and explore what she’s talked about for yourself. And we’ll link to her book and then any other resources. We’ll build a nice show notes page for this conversation. But the technology where you’re actually listening to an engagement where it’s listening… I would love for it to tap in and give me some feedback sometimes on how I’m parenting. I wouldn’t argue with that at all. Geez. But okay, so thinking about bringing therapy into, or advising our patients in what tools they might use. What are your thoughts there? What is the technology that jumps forward that we might be using as clinicians or advising our patients to be using?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: What is super exciting about generative AI is that it lowers the barrier to accessing all this data. So imagine if you can interrogate the data just by talking in plain English, right? Whether it’s by voice or chatting, you can say, hey, given it all the data that you have about my sleep over the last six months, what do you think I should be doing different? And if it has access to your nutrition, there are ways both for the end consumer and patient, but also for somebody like you to be able to say, okay, I’ve got all of Rana’s data. Uncover some of the patterns you’re seeing. As opposed to going into these spreadsheets and data records, you can have the AI in a conversation, uncover these patterns and iterate on them. Draft a case report.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, or just data explore our entire cohort. Does intervention X work? What interventions are you finding? What combinations of interventions are you finding that are working? Or what combinations in certain demographics? I mean, it just blows up. I mean, there’s not a clinician in functional medicine who hasn’t fantasized about having a PhD student in their practice to data explore. To actually have an AI in there doing it— Game changing.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Right, think of this AI as a PhD intern that could get a lot of this legwork done. I think that’s going to be super exciting. And again, the pieces are there, but nobody’s put it all together yet. There’s been some attempts, but we’re not quite there yet.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, it’s a big job. We vet companies for helping us unify our laboratory data all the time and we are getting close to doing a trial. I’ll keep everybody posted, actually. We’ll see how this goes. It’s funny, I’m saying we’re getting close to doing a trial so we’re moving pretty slowly. Because it’s a big commitment on our part to work with the development to bring our technology, bring what we’re doing, and help inform this AI tool to be able to work with us. I mean, there’s a huge time commitment on our part as well. Why don’t you speak to that actually? So we’ve had a couple of conversations on my platform. I’ve had a podcast for the last decade. We have a ton, ton, ton of content. So it’s been brought to my attention that we should have an AI bot metabolize it and just really allow everybody to get in there and access all of it. And it would be awesome to do that.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But what stops us now is that we’re a small team and we ourselves would have to be very intimately involved in that journey. There would be at least one person probably full-time working with the company to make sure… Well and I would have to be involved and you know the other people who generate content on my site, like all of us there would be. There’s a decent chunk of brain power that’s required right now. Will that improve?

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. I think it will. I refer to that entire space like your digital twin. Basically you’re trying to create a digital twin equivalent of you. And I’ve created a digital twin of mine that has my same likeness and voice and I can have it speak in multiple languages. And I think that’s like really interesting.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. That’s cool.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I think if you know me well, you’ll know that it’s not me at all. But if you don’t know me and I’m speaking in Mandarin or Portuguese, two languages that I don’t speak, I think that’s kind of interesting. But the other use case, I had to upload my book, my manuscript, all of my podcast interviews, all of my book tour interviews, into that company’s repository so that they could train a Rana Chatbot. And there’s a lot of questions around that. Like IP, right? I’m giving up control over a lot of my IP. It’s my brain trust. there’s questions around trusting this thing to answer the way I would. What if it goes unhinged and give somebody a completely wrong answer? I would imagine in a clinical context that would be quite catastrophic and dangerous. These are all questions that we need to figure out. But today is the worst the technology will ever be. It’s always getting better and more streamlined and more accurate. So who knows where we’ll be in a year.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Well, and with this idea of really layering in the humanity. I mean, it seems to me like that doesn’t necessarily have to be a heavy lift, and yet it could save us. Right? I mean, the stakes are high. They’re really high.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Right, they are. Another area that I’d love your input on, actually, is longitudinal continuous tracking of hormonal health for women, but I would imagine for men too. I would just love to have that technology and I’m looking at a number of companies building in that space, but I’m curious what you’re seeing.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Well, there’s a company that we’ve worked with. We’ve had webinars with Mira, actually, and a podcast with Mira. It’s not a wearable device, but it’s an at-home, really sophisticated testing tool where you can get lab quality data with a morning urine specimen. So that’s super exciting. And they’re doing some connection with continuous glucose monitoring, so when those two imbalances are interconnected, as we see, the data can be game-changing for clinicians. It’s still a little, or perhaps a lot, cumbersome to collect and to marry both of those data sets together. So we’re not there again, but what’s exciting to me as a clinician and formerly in a laboratory, is the quality of analysis that’s able to happen in the home setting. And I’m also curious about tracking the hydration. I mean, there’s no doubt that we’re going to have very sophisticated wearables. So I guess what I’m saying is, yeah, there’s a place for hormone tracking and the most obvious is going to be in women tracking estrogen, progesterone… and then we move on beyond that—

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Cortisol.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, testosterone, FSH, LH, perhaps growth hormone. Really the sky is the limit if we’re able to access that in a wearable setting. Are they doing that, you know, similarly to…

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Glucose.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right. Or I mean how would they actually find a viable specimen? But I know people are working on that. They must be. They’re working on wearable hormone technology.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Marina Pavlovic on my podcast. Her company is Eli Health, and they’re doing a saliva in-home test, so that’s already in beta. But then there’s a few companies in stealth mode that are doing micro stichel hormone tracking. It’s early, but that would be a game changer. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting. Yeah, it seems logical to me. So just thinking about epigenetics, not just biological age as measured by epigenetics, but just epigenome and going into the omics more broadly, probably with that technology we’ll be able to access that in wearables. We’ll be able to measure some of these changes with wearables. I’m bullish that it will happen. I don’t see it soon, but it’s growing. We’re growing and evolving. And just over the course of my career, we’ve seen so much revolutionary change.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So listen, I want to ask one more question. We’re not necessarily at time, because you can talk as little or as much as you would like to. You really touch on your journey as a woman in this space and we speak to a lot of women in our audience. There’s women here who are clinicians, there’s moms, there’s just these savvy, game-changing women who are excited about the best health and what’s coming next and really paying attention. And there’s a lot of single moms. I’m a single mom like you. This has informed your own journey and your work and I think without the story that you come from, you wouldn’t have been able to create what you’ve created. But thoughts on that, on being a woman in this space. Yeah, I’ll just open it up.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah. You know, if we take a step back, again, AI is presenting this massive economic opportunity and an opportunity to solve real meaningful problems in the world. And if we don’t have enough diverse brains around the table solving with AI, we’re going to get stuck solving the same problems over and over again. And that’s my biggest concern and it’s why I’m extremely passionate about— It’s one of the reasons why I became an investor, actually, after I sold my company. Because who gets the check depends on who writes the check and we just need more women writing checks to more women founders. I’m very passionate about that. And it’s also been really informed by my experience as one of the few women in AI, CEOs and founders.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Ros Picard, my co-founder, the MIT professor and I, when we were raising funding for the company, we did this whole road show in the Bay Area. The road is called Sand Hill and all of these VCs, their offices were stacked back to back. We never pitched to a woman investor. It was, for the most part, older white men and we were pitching an emotion company. And although we got a lot of credibility coming out of MIT, we were always treated with respect and taken seriously, but a lot of the time they were like, emotions? Really? Like, who cares, right? And so I think that’s why we need diverse builders, but also diverse investors.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: I’ve always been a minority in the space. I still am in a number of ways. But I try to think of it as a superpower, honestly, because in a way it’s easier to stand out. And I’ve learned over the years to just lean into who I am and be authentic. If you look at my pictures pitching the company when we first spun out of MIT, I was always wearing gray and drab. And at some point we were like, we are an emotion company, we are going to own this, and we rebranded to hot pink. And we had all these cars drive around Boston in hot pink with our logo on it. And so at some point I just decided to own who we are, talk about my experience as a single mom, bring my kids to work and just integrate more of my life. It’s a work in progress, but I’ve definitely made a lot of progress since the early days of being a CEO.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Or since the early days going to Cambridge, you know, just your journey, what a badass. Thank you so much, Rana, for joining me on New Frontiers and just sharing all of this knowledge and vision today. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: To be continued.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby: To be continued. Love that.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American AI scientist, entrepreneur and investor. She is co-founder and Managing Partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, where she invests in startups building Human-Centric AI, and host of the Pioneers of AI podcast. Prior to that, Rana founded her company Affectiva out of MIT, where she pioneered the field of Emotion AI, and successfully exited the company in 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a Post Doctorate from MIT.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby

Blue Tulip Ventures

Pioneers of AI podcast

Girl Decoded

Affectiva – A Smart Eye Company

Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D., FIEEE

Happypillar

Human-Centered AI Institute at Stanford

Advancing Humans with AI at MIT

Videra Health

Peter Diamandis

BrainKey

Cleerly Health

Jennifer Heil, CEO of Rya Health

Mira Fertility Tracker

Whoop

Meridith Cass, founder of Nix Biosensors

Marina Pavlovic, Co-Founder of Eli Health

Blog: How Hormone Monitors are Changing the Way Providers Care for Women

Podcast: Unraveling PCOS and Fertility: Debunking Common Misconceptions with Dr. Tara Harding

Blog: How to Start and Grow Your Practice (for Clinicians, not MBAs!)

Podcast: Why You’re Aging Faster Than You Think & How to Slow It

DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge

Bio Age Lab Test

Bio Age Self Assessment Quiz

Younger You Group Program

Younger You book

Better Broths and Healing Tonics book

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