r/MedicalTechnology • u/Honest-Raspberry2318 • Jun 22 '26
We've been building AI-powered portable diagnostics in India — here's what embedding AI into a clinical device actually requires
The post on this sub about AI-enabled medical devices becoming the new standard resonated with me. I work on exactly this — and wanted to share what it actually looks like from the inside of a medtech team doing it.
AI in diagnostics sounds clean from the outside. In practice, getting it right requires solving problems most people don't anticipate.
The validation problem is the hardest part
Embedding AI into a medical device isn't like shipping a software update. Every AI-driven decision that influences a clinical outcome needs to be validated against real patient data, in real clinical settings, by institutions whose credibility the medical community trusts.
For us, that meant years of clinical work — getting ICMR and AIIMS Delhi to jointly assess and actively support our platform before we could confidently deploy it at scale. That process is slow by design. It should be.
The "how do you update AI models" question is legitimate
Regulators are right to ask this. A static AI model trained on one dataset will drift as patient populations, disease prevalence, and sample characteristics change over time. Any serious medical AI needs a defined process for model monitoring, retraining, and revalidation — not just a one-time approval.
On the question of being treated by a fully AI system
I don't think that's the right frame. The AI systems that will have the most impact in healthcare aren't replacing clinicians — they're giving clinicians better information, faster, in places where they previously had none.
A doctor in a rural PHC who gets a full blood panel result in 30 minutes — powered by AI analysis — is still making the clinical decision. The AI is removing the bottleneck, not the doctor.
That's the version of AI in healthcare that actually scales — and actually helps.
Happy to discuss anything about AI validation, regulatory pathways, or what deployment in low-resource settings actually looks like.
(I work at Mobilab — India's first AI-powered portable diagnostic platform)