[rscho]

> What I fail to understand is how you cannot see that there must necessarily be predictive value in such a database.

I can see allright. But you cannot see that your hypothetical database is lacking most of the info because your doc actually mostly evaluates you by looking at your general composure and relying on X years of experience and a bit of knowledge shoves that into the really complex decision tree in his head: "Hmmmm... this guy looks mostly fine."

Now, you feed your database to the latest deep-learning shiny thingy that tells you: "this guy has X% chance of having a horrible cancer, but I can't explain why". So you enjoy many months of costly investigation because you don't want to miss something, right? And after the fact, it is discovered that the lack of standardization in measurements caused the algorithm to decide that the light hue in the office was a sign of cancer.

All that to say that yes, someday what you are imagining may well be possible, but we are really very far from having the technology to do that now.

[FredPret]

I would have never thought of this, but I'm pretty sure gait, posture, and voice analyses can reliably be classified as "probably ill" or "probably well".