The world of technology has come leaps and bounds in the past few decades. It’s transformed a lot of workforces, with the healthcare sector being a focal point of innovation. From the rise of wearables that track heart rate and blood pressure to being able to undertake online PhD programs in nursing over the computer, tech has revolutionized the health industry. Here are five new technologies and the impact they are having on the way we deliver, manage, and experience health services.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Artificial intelligence has revolutionized, in particular, the way we diagnose illnesses. Many advancements in this area in recent years means that we can now diagnose things like breast cancer earlier, faster, and with more accuracy. For example, before AI breast cancer detection, mammograms were relatively hit or miss (especially for a medical service), leading to around 1 in 2 patients being told incorrectly that they had breast cancer. With new advancements, breast cancer detection is now 99% accurate and 30 times faster than human detection.
Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual reality has benefits for both patients and healthcare providers. On the provider side, VR can be used in training and college settings, allowing doctors and other medical professionals to simulate a realistic working environment without the risk of a real one. For example, medical professionals can perform simulated surgeries in VR—and unlike real life, with the click of a button, they can even do things like change the camera view to enter the patient’s body at a smaller scale.
On the patient side, VR has many applications but is particularly relevant for helping those with mental disorders. For example, fear-based exposure therapy can drastically reduce the impact of patient phobias by providing a more realistic environment that simulates the patient’s fear. VR can also be used to increase pain tolerance by essentially distracting patients through painful medical procedures. Because VR involves the patient’s visual and auditory processing, as well as their physical behaviours, it’s much more effective than traditional distraction techniques.
Robotics
While robots have been around for several years now, advancements in their capabilities and reliability mean that they are now finally becoming more common in healthcare settings. For example, some surgeries can be performed by human-controlled robots, where a human doctor controls a robotic arm that can make cuts with more accuracy, flexibility and control than a traditional surgery by hand. These surgeries typically result in less invasive and noticeable scars, less blood loss, and, therefore, shorter hospital stays.
Robots can also be paired with AI to provide care for elderly or disabled people, especially those with degenerative mental illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, by providing them with companionship and basic support with everyday tasks. Having a presence to talk to and interact with can support elderly people and reduce feelings of loneliness and depression. By having robots perform these tasks, we can free up the often already stretched human workforce to attend to more urgent or emergency tasks.
Wearables
From Apple Watches to Fitbits to smart rings, it seems like everyone these days is wearing some sort of device that tracks their health and physical exercise. Consumer wearables are changing the way that people discover and track their health data—in the past, you would have to visit a doctor or have specialized equipment to find out things like your blood oxygen levels. Now, people have access to a constant stream of data about their health. Many consumer wearables are also encouraging people to live more active and healthy lifestyles, and some can even help in emergency situations with things like automatic fall or crash detection.
Chatbots
Similar to robots, AI and virtual reality, chatbots have the greatest impact on the mental health space by providing people with basic, everyday companionship. By pairing chatbots with robots or virtual reality, we can create more realistic conversation partners or simulations, leading to a greater sense of immersion and, therefore, better results, which more accurately recreate the feeling of talking to a human.
To sum up
Even within the last ten years, new technologies have hugely changed the face of modern medicine. As technology continues to advance, we can only begin to guess at what new developments could upend tradition in the space of years. Hopefully, with new developments come better outcomes, happier patients, and more lives saved.
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