Silicon valley and the search for immortality — the future of healthcare
1. Yogesh Malik
Future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed. Technology Evangelist and Digital Futurist
Sep 5 · 4 min read
Silicon Valley and The Search For Immortality—
The Future Of Healthcare
Digital Pills, Sensors, and Big Data
Success of healthcare will depend on the quality and quality of usable data.
Digital pills and sensors in your body will communicate with portable heath
device and your mobile phone to collect critical health data from your body.
Data Will Make You Live Longer—#HealthTech
Your wearable or smart phone will alert you in case if you need to act—and
your health care center and doctor will get automatically notified
2. Doctors, hospitals & machines will be on the same page, accessing the right
information—and all that will save lives, and you will live longer.
3D Printed Drugs & Organs
3D printing is going to transform medicine and how healthcare is delivered,
from pills to hearing aids to human tissues and organs -all can be printed
using 3D-printer
Polypills, pills containing multiple drugs has been successfully printed.
People would be able to have medicine tailored to their age,
size, gender and medical requirements, rather than having
to conform to current mass-production standards
says Lucy Ackland, senior development engineer at the Institution of
Engineering and Technology.
3. Using multiple 3D printing tools, medical scientists at Princeton University
have created a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the
range of normal human capability.
In August 2015, SPRITAM (levetiracetam) drug became the first 3D printed
medicine to receive FDA approval.
Patient Experience / Personalized Treatment
From general healthcare to personal healthcare
Technology is making the concepts of health and health care moving towards
the idea of personalized preventive health maintenance and away from an
exclusive focus on the cure of disease
This include
the empowerment of the individual,•
4. of any age,
to self-monitor
and self-manage health and wellness,
and conditions of higher risk and existing diagnosis,
and further, to start doing this today
with applications and tools
that are already available in today’s digital world
Example: GALE: 21st Century First aid kit—which transforms home
healthcare
Lab on a Chip
The ability to perform multiple laboratory operations on small scales using
miniaturized (lab-on-a-chip) devices has many benefits
UCLA uses lab-on-a-chip technology to predict how hazardous engineered
nanomaterials might be. It could also be used to identify biological
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GALE: Smart, Informative, Organized Home H...
21st Century First aid kit
5. biomarkers that will help medical scientists and doctors detect cancer and
other infectious diseases
According to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Global biochips
anticipated market to reach USD 25.84 billion by 2024—and DNA chips is
the largest revenue-generating segment of the biochip applications available
HealthTech—Health Technology
While technology is working on augmenting human capabilities and nanobots
are still not fully operational- but we have enough technology in today’s
healthcare like:-
Digital literacy channels for medical information curated by healthcare
professionals
Smart watches and wearables that collect and enable real-time analysis
of health information
3D printed drugs and human organs
Telemedicine and robotics intervened surgeries
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence based medical decision
support
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IBM program on exosome based liquid biopsi...
6. 2050, there will be a “mental revolution.” We’ll have effective, safe treatments
for at least 10 neurodegenerative disorders. And if we’re lucky,
humans will have some telepathic communication capabilities.
Currently one medical test leads to another, and then another, leading to
medical overtreatment. There are hardly any benefits to patients about minor
and very low-risk findings—and all that comes with financial and
physiological impacts. Growing number of incidentals findings leads to over-
treatment
Overused medical services are already costing billions of dollars, and may be
medical overtreatment is making us sicker, but futurist Kurzweil says that
humans will be immortal by 2030
Data will make you live longer. “Curing Death” and “Reversing Aging” could
be Google’s next milestones in the search for immortality. #HealthTech
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