happy new year everyone let's celebrate the new decade and be a little hopeful
about digital health by looking at the top 10 medical technologies of the
future here we go
if you're a subscriber of the channel you might have heard about most of the
following technologies by now you know that we describe digital health
developments their impact on your health medicine and healthcare in general so
you know all that now for something completely different today we are going
to use a scoring system to rank their place in the future of digital health
because as we all know the absolute best way to measure the potential of future
medical technologies is subjective numerical scores so I'm going to assign
a score on a scale from 1 to 10 in three categories how close is the given
technology from becoming real the potential impact it can have on health
care and accessibility to the masses may the best technology win Health sensors
and telehealth in the future as we look back on today's healthcare it will look
completely absurd that when something goes wrong with our health we have to
get into a car and drive to the nearest facility where we can receive care
health sensors and telemedicine will change all of that and make patients the
point of care even today variables are mainstream and the Apple
watch or the ECG device cardia have such great health functions that have
reportedly saved multiple lives by alerting users in time of a serious
cardiovascular condition but in the future we will measure not just heart
rate and step count but pretty much everything we can from blood pressure to
respiration patterns an ECG and so on with a digit or two and with the rise of
portable diagnostic devices such as mobile oz or sound scanners or medical
tricorders such as this one here medical professionals will be able to obtain
most of the information that's needed for an educated diagnosis
at the patient's bedside so how close is the given technology from becoming real
well many of these have already been available so I will give it a nine out
of ten the potential impact it can have on healthcare
can you imagine patients living their lives without measuring data that shape
their treatment can you imagine how much information and data is will provide
physicians with so they can make better decisions with the patient's so eight
out of ten and accessibility to the masses it's a harder issue as many of
these devices are a bit expensive or simply are not on the market yet so
seven out of them the medical futurist index then is 24 mixed reality mixed
reality is going to be a key component of the future of healthcare
unlike virtual reality that shuts out the outside word and unlike augmented
reality that only projects digital information on the real word mixed
reality projects content that interacts in the real word environment now I want
you to imagine a surgeon preparing for a complicated brain surgery in the future
the hospital received the armored images and a mixed reality device renders it
into a three-dimensional holographic image the doctor can take a look at the
problematic area analyze it layer by layer and plan their entire intervention
why they could literally zoom in and out of the patient before making the first
incision imagine medical students study anatomy
in groups by dissecting a holographic body without physical limitations or the
formaldehyde smell so there are examples for using mixed reality even today but
you won't see these devices going mainstream so I would give it a six out
of ten the potential impact can be significant but it will not be a
life-changer five out of ten these devices are expensive and wild costs go
down it remains steadily unreachable for the
masses five out of ten the magic curvature is the index is 17 surgical
and medical robotics to stay with that brain surgeon for a second also imagine
that they have a surgical robot at his disposal the doctor can practice and
find the absolute best way to operate on the patient and let the robot support
their procedure then then reaching absolute precision and no shaking hands
some surgical robots could follow pre-programmed protocols and become semi
or even fully autonomous in performing surgery deaths our robotics can become a
perfect tool in the hands of physicians but robots can also disrupt healthcare
in more ways machines don't need sleep or food don't have prejudices and
definitely won't grant about why they need to complete the same monotones test
for the thousandth time for example disinfecting a hospital room in minutes
bringing medicine up to the tenth floor or provide elderly patients with
companionship thousands of surgical robots work in hospitals today but there
is still a long road ahead so six out of them the impact of automation
regarding physical and repetitive tasks could be huge on the medical workforce
eight out of ten but the vast majority of these robots are really expensive and
unreachable in certain areas I will give it four out of ten the medical features
index is 18 brain computer interfaces research has geared up lately in the
area of brain computer interfaces to these brain implants today are where
laser eye surgery was decades ago but a field will advanced significantly in the
coming years there are numerous successful tests
where brain implant therapies for people paralyzed by spinal cord injury or other
neurological damage could restore some movement and function but we can go even
further than that imagine a retinal chip giving you
perfect eyesight cochlear implant granting your perfect hearing or a
memory chip bestowing you with almost Lin
less memory it's like something out of a science fiction novel while you see
heartwarming examples in the news about paralyzed people being able to control
their prosthetics or as of skeletons it's still an image from the far future
therefore I give it three out of them regarding the impact on healthcare it's
hard to determine but regarding the impact this technology can have on
individuals with such health issues it will be a life changer so seven out of
ten and knowing that one robot prosthetic costs about one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars I would say it's not really available to the masses
three out of ten the medical futurist index is 13 nanotechnology scallop
shaped micro particles have already been shown to swim in the eye and perform
procedures but what if nano particles and nano could operate as precise drug
delivery systems just imagine a nanometer sized stool injected into your
body that releases a medication but doesn't get attacked by your immune
system how about injecting chemotherapy into cancer cells while keeping healthy
cells untouched microscopic robots inside you could send warnings to your
smartphone that the disease is about to develop in your body so you can try to
prevent it in that scenario even the word symptom would be completely
eradicated from our medical dictionaries nanotech is amazing but still pure
science fiction 2 out of 10 for the impact it can have on people's lives and
prevention I would say 7 out of them and for availability to the masses two out
of them the medical futurist index is 11 5g the upcoming 5g upgrade of our
telecommunications networks will lay down the foundation for the digital
health evolution right now smart sensors and the Internet of Things tools are
putting our networks under increasing strain but 5g will bring more speed and
capacity to them which will open the door to a flood of innovative
technologies in the future variables and pocket-sized connected devices will
constantly monitor the state of the patience and high-speed 5g networks will
allow smart algorithms and artificial intelligence to use the vast amounts of
data gained from these variables to do real-time analysis on them and notify a
patient's position in case anything is about to go wrong with them but what if
there is a bigger problem that needs surgery 5g is fast Network can handle
remote surgeries as the turnaround time for information between two points of
network will fall to around one millisecond basically a patient with a
certain condition could have a specialist halfway across the world to
surgery on them 5g is coming this year as many operators are deploying their
new networks so it's eight out of ten the impact will only be significant if
healthcare providers start adapting it six out of them as if you become
available this year many will get access to it in the most developed regions only
six out of ten for accessibility the medical features index is twenty
direct-to-consumer genetic testing if you follow this channel you know that
I'm a big advocate for genetic testing and full genome sequencing in particular
it's an oftentimes startling but absolutely crucial part of a responsible
and health-conscious lifestyle phoo genome sequencing is basically a
method of deciphering your entire DNA and looking at it through the lenses of
our collective knowledge of how our genome affects health it can be a
goldmine of information it can show you your risks for certain diseases that you
would otherwise not know of and so you can create a preventive plan around it
with your physician to shape your lifestyle in a way to keep you healthy
in the long run for example if your genome report shows that you have a risk
of diabetes you can change your diet and exercise more to try to prevent it from
happening in the future it will be hard to imagine that there was a time when
our diet and our lifestyle were arbitrary and not based on
science many tests are already available but we are still waiting for
comprehensive tests so for that it's eight out of ten the impact of genomics
on every aspect of healthcare from medication sensitivity to nutrition will
be huge it's nine out of ten that huge and then genome sequencing is still
expensive even though millions of people have used simpler generic testing
services so it's a hard question but for accessibility I will give it a seven out
of ten the magical futurist index is 24 3d
printing 3d printers have been all over the news in the past few years from
printing weapons to printing entire buildings but their most impactful
feature is yet to receive the spotlight probably the first thing that comes to
mind in terms of health care is that 3d printing can be the solution for people
in need of mobility devices such as prosthetics while traditional
prosthetics are expensive an 80% of the words amputees don't even have access to
facilities but they could receive one 3d printing will be a cost effective way to
get modern customizable prosthetics for people in need another less obvious
example of how 3d printing can distort healthcare is bio printing it is the
creation of living tissues such as blood vessels bones or organs through 3d
printing this can be an answer to the words organ shortage but printing organs
is a bit more complicated than printing prosthetics
but one day we might be able to successfully restore the function of
damaged organs and maybe just maybe further down the line if one of your
organs needs to be replaced and you send in a tissue sample to nearby printing
facility and a few days later they could send you back a new functioning organ it
FedEx the cost of review printers is going down fast but practical
applications in medicine such as bio printers are lagging behind six out of
them the impact would be obviously great
eight out of ten and the accessibility is the real challenge here three out of
them the medical feature is index is 17 and now artificial intelligence AI has
an unimaginable potential we're in the next couple of years it will
revolutionize every area of our life including medicine I'm fully convinced
then if we redesign healthcare completely and for the better
as AI will be able to mine and utilize vast amounts of medical data and our
entire medical knowledge going back to 2,000 years it will be able to support
making better diagnosis help design treatment plans and since it will be
able to better understand the information it can gain from our DNA ai
will help healthcare move from the traditional one-size-fits-all medical
solutions to targeted treatments personalized therapy and uniquely
customized drugs simply put AI will find answers to formerly insoluble medical
problems and cure formerly incurable diseases what can I say there are
studies already showing that artificial narrow intelligence based algorithms are
able to support many of the processes I just described it's getting there even
though if we still take years to fully enjoy the benefits of AI in healthcare
so how close is it to reality I would say six out of them the impact no
question about it the mother of all medical technologies 10 out of them the
accessibility will be tricky depending on where the patient or physician lives
five out of them the medical futurist index is 21 quantum computing quantum
computing is hard to even define but if it's computing powers can make current
supercomputers look like down the nation tools and there's no limits of how much
it can disrupt our lives and healthcare in particular for example it will be
able to sequence our entire DNA in probably under minutes which means the
genetic testing will be a basis of Diagnostics the way blood and urine
tests are today and the dead processing power quantum computers you'll be able
to make reliable predictions about what might go wrong with the patient and what
they can do now to prevent it based on analyzing the tens of millions of
studies in real time quantum computers will also revolutionize drug design by
launching the era of in silikal clinical trials when we don't test drugs on
patients anymore and all that will lead to precision medicine and a perfect
decision support system it's almost too good to be true and it is it still it's
still a thing of the future even if Google has already shown its quantum
supremacy so one out of ten eventually the impact will be almost as huge as in
the case of AI nine out of ten but I'm afraid only those nations will benefit
from it that we'll be able to afford quantum computers and there are not many
of them three out of them the medical futurist index is 13 so let's see the
final ranking Wow it seems health sensors and genomics on the top well
these are the two technologies that can have the largest impact on our lives
today and they already have evidence in the background so I guess it's
understandable but make no mistake when artificial intelligence eventually comes
it's going to blow them out of the water so in two weeks I will clear every
confusion I will explain every basic details about that to make you an AI
expert - happy new year and see you then
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