Preparing The Ageing Society in Malaysia With AI-Healthcare

By Farahdiba Abdullah

The ageing of the population is becoming a global concern. The pattern of low birth rates and increased life expectancy across countries including Malaysia results in an increase of median age of its citizens. Malaysia will achieve the status of ‘ageing country’ by 2030 as projected by the United Nations. When 15 percent of the overall population consists of those aged 60 years or older, a country will reach the status of ageing nation. Our country is one of the fastest ageing nations globally. It will take only 25 years for Malaysia to move from an ageing to an aged nation. However, compared to other countries, we still lack planning for this ageing population growth especially in healthcare services.

Healthcare services is an important aspect to consider in deciding whether a city is aged friendly. The government should develop on two main areas healthcare and innovation to provide an aged-friendly system that focuses on prevention of illnesses and reduce the costs of hospital care. According to The Star (2018), Malaysia only spends 4.3 percent of its GDP on healthcare. The government will need to diverge their focus and implement more intensified projects using caregiving technology to improve healthcare facilities in the long run. For example, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for personalized treatments and medicines as follow:

From the Figure above, AI tools can be used to integrate healthcare models to provide more effective treatments by incorporating reliable diagnostics and better knowledge of patient health conditions. AI technologies can be applied to facilitate the development of new kind of services quickly and at a lower cost. These are some of the simple ways to deal with the rapidly increasing number of old citizens with poor health conditions as well as to prevent congestion in hospitals. We must accept the fact that fast-growing elderly population will strain the healthcare system that is currently in use.

The population ageing is not something to be mourned. Rather, it should be celebrated by taking this golden opportunity to improve socio-economic conditions via technological advancement. For example, AI personalized treatments can help a lot of people who are less fortunate particularly in rural areas. Also, they may not be able to get to a hospital easily when they are sick. This kind of problems need to be solved immediately while Malaysia still has around 10 years before the economic impact of an ageing population becomes apparent.