Tristan Debrauwere
If you have diabetes or know someone who does, the small, wearable biosensor will probably look pretty familiar. You slap it on your arm and a small filament slides directly under your skin to convey data on your blood glucose levels to the sensor, connecting to your phone via Bluetooth so you can easily monitor them. If you’re diabetic, keeping your blood sugar levels stable means avoiding long-term health problems down the road. If you’re not, it means you can maximize your athletic performance … or just prevent that 3 pm brain fog…….Continue reading…..
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Source: WIRED
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Critics:
During the pre-digital era, patients suffered from inefficient and faulty clinical systems, processes, and conditions. Many medical errors happened in the past due to undeveloped health technologies.Some examples of these medical errors included adverse drug events and alarm fatigue. When many alarms are repeatedly triggered or activated, especially for unimportant events, workers may become desensitized to the alarms.
Healthcare professionals who have alarm fatigue may ignore an alarm believing it to be insignificant, which could lead to death and dangerous situations. With technological development, an intelligent program of integration and physiologic sense-making was developed and helped reduce the number of false alarms.
Smartphones, tablets, and wearable computers have allowed people to monitor their health. These devices run numerous applications that are designed to provide simple health services and the monitoring of one’s health with finding as critical problems to health as possible. An example of this is Fitbit, a fitness tracker that is worn on the user’s wrist. This wearable technology allows people to track their steps, heart rate, floors climbed, miles walked, active minutes, and even sleep patterns.
The data collected and analyzed allow users not just to keep track of their health but also help manage it, particularly through its capability to identify health risk factors. There is also the case of the Internet, which serves as a repository of information and expert content that can be used to “self-diagnose” instead of going to their doctor. For instance, one need only enumerate symptoms as search parameters at Google and the search engine could identify the illness from the list of contents uploaded to the World Wide Web, particularly those provided by expert/medical sources.
These advances may eventually have some effect on doctor visits from patients and change the role of the health professionals from “gatekeeper to secondary care to facilitator of information interpretation and decision-making.” Apart from basic services provided by Google in Search, there are also companies such as WebMD that already offer dedicated symptom-checking apps.
Also, with greater investment in health technologies, fewer medical errors happened. Outdated paper records were replaced in many healthcare organizations by electronic health records (EHR). According to studies, this has brought many changes to healthcare. Drug administration has improved, healthcare providers can now access medical information easier, provide better treatments and faster results, and save more costs.
Phones that can track one’s whereabouts, steps and more can serve as medical devices, and medical devices have much the same effect as these phones. According to one study, people were willing to share personal data for scientific advancements, although they still expressed uncertainty about who would have access to their data . People are naturally cautious about giving out sensitive personal information.
Phones add an extra level of threat. Mobile devices continue to increase in popularity each year. The addition of mobile devices serving as medical devices increases the chances for an attacker to gain unauthorized information. In 2015 the Medical Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) was passed, pushing towards electronic health records. In the article “Health Information Technology:
Integration, Patient Empowerment, and Security”, K. Marvin provided multiple different polls based on people’s views on different types of technology entering the medical field most answers were responded with somewhat likely and very few completely disagreed on the technology being used in medicine. Marvin discusses the maintenance required to protect medical data and technology against cyber attacks as well as providing a proper data backup system for the information.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) also known as Obamacare and health information technology health care is entering the digital era. Although with this development it needs to be protected. Both health information and financial information now made digital within the health industry might become a larger target for cyber-crime. Even with multiple different types of safeguards hackers somehow still find their way in so the security that is in place needs to constantly be updated to prevent these breaches.
Medical technology, or “medtech”, encompasses a wide range of healthcare products and is used to treat diseases and medical conditions affecting humans. Such technologies are intended to improve the quality of healthcare delivered through earlier diagnosis, less invasive treatment options and reduction in hospital stays and rehabilitation times. Recent advances in medical technology have also focused on cost reduction. Medical technology may broadly include medical devices, information technology, biotech, and healthcare services.
The impacts of medical technology involve social and ethical issues. For example, physicians can seek objective information from technology rather than read subjective patient reports. A major driver of the sector’s growth is the consumerization of medtech. Supported by the widespread availability of smartphones and tablets, providers can reach a large audience at low cost, a trend that stands to be consolidated as wearable technologies spread throughout the market.
In the years 2010–2015, venture funding has grown 200%, allowing US$11.7 billion to flow into health tech businesses from over 30,000 investors in the space. AI brings many benefits to the healthcare industry. AI helps to detect diseases, administer chronic conditions, deliver health services, and discover the drug. Furthermore, AI has the potential to address important health challenges. In healthcare organizations, AI is able to plan and relocate resources.
AI is able to match patients with healthcare providers that meet their needs. AI also helps improve the healthcare experience by using an app to identify patients’ anxieties. In medical research, AI helps to analyze and evaluate the patterns and complex data. For instance, AI is important in drug discovery because it can search relevant studies and analyze different kinds of data. In clinical care, AI helps to detect diseases, analyze clinical data, publications, and guidelines.
As such, AI aids to find the best treatments for the patients. Other uses of AI in clinical care include medical imaging, echocardiography, screening, and surgery. The ability of AlphaFold to predict how proteins fold also significantly accelerated medical research. Medical virtual reality provides doctors multiple surgical scenarios that could happen and allows them to practice and prepare themselves for these situations. It also permits medical students a hands-on experience of different procedures without the consequences of making potential mistakes.
ORamaVR is one of the leading companies that employ such medical virtual reality technologies to transform medical education (knowledge) and training (skills) to improve patient outcomes, reduce surgical errors and training time and democratize medical education and training. Modern robotics have made huge progress and contribution to healthcare. Robots can help doctors in performing variety tasks. Robotics adoption is increasing tremendously in hospitals. The following are different ways to improve healthcare by using robots:
Surgical robots are one of the robotic systems, which allows a surgeon to bend and rotate tissues in a more flexible and efficient way. The system is equipped with a3D magnification vision system that can translate the hand movements of the surgeon to be precise in-order to perform a surgery with minimal incisions. Other robotics systems include the ability to diagnose and treat cancers. Many scientists began working on creating a next-generation robot system to assist the surgeon in performing knee and other bone replacement surgeries.
Assistant robots will also be important to help reduce the workload for regular medical staff. They can help nurses with simple and time-consuming tasks like carrying multiple racks of medicines, lab specimen or other sensitive materials. Shortly, robotic pills are expected to reduce the number of surgeries. They can be moved inside a patient and delivered to the desired area. In addition, they can conduct biopsies, film the area and clear clogged arteries.
Assistive technologies are products designed to provide accessibility to individuals who have physical or cognitive problems or disabilities. They aim to improve the quality of life with assistive technologies. The range of assistive technologies is broad, ranging from low-tech solutions to physical hardware, to technical devices. There are four areas of assistive technologies, which include visual impairment, hearing impairment, physical limitations, cognitive limitations.
There are many benefits of assistive technologies. They enable individuals to care for themselves, work, study, access information easily, improve independence and communication, and lastly participate fully in community life.
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