Evolving Medicine: The Input of Technology
Advances in digital healthcare technologies such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), VR/AR, robotics, and 3D-printing have become the future of medicine. Hence, it is essential that we should become familiar with new creations to manage the control of technology and not the other way around.
The future of medicine lies in a working partnership with technology, alongside the clients to embrace the changes being made in the healthcare industry so that we may remain relevant for many more years to come.
Although, there have been some fears about how technology might take over – but we need to realise that there are just misconceptions and we cannot stop technology from evolving. But what we can do is work hand-in-hand with it so that we can bring about an improved healthcare on a global level.
Just look at the work done by Shu Li – a revered scientist and serial entrepreneur, among many other things who founded various enterprises within the healthcare, semiconductor, biomedical sectors such as the Cellular BioMedicine Group, Helio Genomics, WA Health Centres, to name a few.
For more than 30 years, Li has been actively involved in the healthcare industry where his focus is mostly on regenerative medicine, functional medicine, and more. He is also the founder of the Cellular BioMedicine Group – a company which serves as a biopharmaceutical company in CAR-T cancer immunotherapy and stem cell joint regeneration.
Naturally his work has encouraged many other professionals in the medical industry to make the most out of technology and use it to take medical treatments to another level. So how would that look in practice? Here are some examples.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is a powerful tool that has significantly revolutionised the healthcare industry. Having the ability to mine medical records, the AI algorithms can also develop drugs at a faster pace, design treatment plans, including diagnosing cancerous and noncancerous tissue samples.
In fact, Google’s DeerMind developed an AI for creating proper analysis of breast cancer. According to their data, the algorithm had exceeded the performance of human radiologists by more than 11% on pre-cleared sets of the data meant to distinguish breast cancer.
Medical Tricorder
One of the things that most healthcare professionals would like to have is an all powerful device that could help them analyse and diagnose a myriad of illnesses.
What if we told you that many companies are determined to see through those ambitions and that we have successfully created these devices? An example includes the Viatom CheckMe Pro, which is used to measure temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, ECG, and more. There are also other companies who are moving towards making similar devices – like the recent BioIntelliSense which is FDA-cleared and works to measure many parameters like skin temperature, heart rate, sleep status, etc.
And what is even more interesting is that these are just a few examples of the many ways technology has been contributing to modern technology with its innovative ways to improve medicine in ways we never thought possible.