AI Agent and Copilot Podcast: OpenClaw-Powered Healthcare Assistant Builds Patient Agency

Welcome to this AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, where we analyze the opportunities, impact, and outcomes that are possible with AI.

In this episode, I speak with about RealActivity CEO Paul Swider who shares details on a personal AI healthcare assistant he is developing.

Highlights

Background, Personal Health Journey (1:23 )

The personal health intelligence AI assistant is called Tula. Swider refers to himself as a “biohacker” using various health devices and monitors. He emphasizes his passion for patient agency and health equity. These factors led to the development of Tula; initial steps were taken over a year ago as he was analyzing health data with AI models.

OpenClaw and Tula’s Enterprise Implications (4:28)

Swider explains how he adapted the Open Claw personal AI assistant to run on a Linux Ubuntu server in the cloud. He discusses the use of API calls and state-of-the-art healthcare models to drive Tula’s functionality. He emphasizes the importance of patients owning their health data and having a living, ongoing health agent. He expects Tula can level the playing field globally by providing simplified access to this data. A colleague’s personal story includes a family member’s cancer and highlights the need for greater patient agency.

Core and Advanced Features (10:05)

Tula includes an email router that allows users to send health data to Tula via email while maintaining secure data transport and HIPAA compliance. Tula can read medical images and the agent developed a PDF viewer for those images. “I tell the I tell tool, I say, ‘Tula, wouldn’t it be cool if you had a PDF viewer and reader that was specific to healthcare?’ Long story short, it went away for a couple of hours. I came back the next day…and it had built out the most cool tool. It’s called MedPDF.”

He emphasizes the flexibility of Tula in ingesting various types of health data. He mentions the potential for additional contributors to the open-source project and expresses confidence in the project’s scalability and the potential for commercialization.

He notes that OpenClaw “gives you the ability to own your agent instead of renting your agent. I can go run it anywhere, any cloud, anytime I want. I own that agent.” That contrasts with agents from Claude, or Microsoft, or AWS, where you’re renting SaaS agents, he says.

More Healthcare AI Insights With Paul Swider

• More details on Tula (GitHub)
• Microsoft, Epic Outline Ambitious Healthcare Agent Initiatives
• Microsoft AI Model ‘Self-Sufficiency’ Requires Customers to Hedge Bets
• Google Cloud Showcases Big AI Healthcare Advances

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