Just How Rare Are Rare Diseases on Ada, a Medical Symptom Checker?

When encountering a health problem, people increasingly turn to the internet. One digital tool is Ada, a conversational text-based app that uses AI with a database of doctor-curated medical knowledge to alert people to the possibility of diseases (including those that are rare) based on a constellation of health factors and user-reported symptoms.

We set out to identify what proportion of diseases suggested to our users during symptom assessments were classified as ‘rare’ under the common European definition.