Article category: Clinical practice

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 supplanted by machines. The recent emergence of artificially intelligent machines has seen human cognitive capacity augmented 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 will likely to have a more significant impact on human progress than the steam engine. As AI-based technology becomes increasingly embedded within devices, people and systems, the fundamental nature of clinical practice will evolve, resulting in a healthcare system requiring profound changes to physiotherapy 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 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.