The next big tech advancements in healthcare

Healthcare is defined by advancements in technology. The industry is always pushing, always researching, always upgrading. Even from the basic scalpel from a broken rock to the sharpest tool possible is an advancement. So has anything more impressive occurred since the scalpel? Of course. Take a look at our favourite tech advancements in healthcare.

AI

Artificial intelligence is a very vague term that covers a range of tech advancements, but it also has a lot of applications. No where is this better seen in an industry but in healthcare. AI is integrated into lots of elements of running a hospital or doctor’s office. For example, algorithms are hugely helpful identifying patterns in healthcare, leading to more diagnoses. Even more impressively, artificial intelligence is a bit part of making prosthetic limbs autonomous. Modern, cutting edge, arms are hooked up to the brain and respond to signals in the stump due to AI, but with the advancement of AI, there is soon to be no need to physically connect the prosthetic to the chip in the brain.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. As mentioned, there are a lot of uses for AI across healthcare. Are they always as impressive as brain-controlled prosthetics? No, but they’re usually just as important.

Bioscience

Bioscience also has a lot of uses throughout healthcare. Primarily it’s a major component of pharmaceuticals, creating and refining the drugs that turn HIV from a plague to a condition that one can live with. Bioscience informs biotechnology, next generation sequencing or NGS, which works with DNA, bioinformatics, molecular genetics, and more to identify the causes and attempt to fix problems in healthcare on a molecular level. Advancements such as this is being pioneered by companies like the Source Bioscience group, for example.

Wearables

Wearables are as yet very underrated in healthcare. Where the average person might see a cool gadget that is perhaps a little gimmicky, a healthcare professional is likely to see a remote heart monitor. And that’s the concept that a lot of wearables have developed from. Wearables come in heart in and blood pressure monitors. Anything you can imagine being hooked up to in intensive care, can now go home and be simply set up in your own home.

This is revolutionising healthcare for the simple practicality of it. Patients can be monitored from afar, contacted from afar and even treated from afar. It’s particularly useful in rural areas, of which the British Isles is a majority of, where healthcare professionals are stretched thin and cannot home visit everyone miles away to perform a check up.

Data storage

Another practical move from technology is the use of data storage. Rather than the image of a doctor with the coat, the stethoscope, and the patient paper file, perhaps on a clipboard, the doctor is now fitted with a tablet. It holds all the patients’ files of the doctor behind a strong security control so that information isn’t mistakenly shared or hacked. And since everyone needs a doctor, that means millions of files contained in a practical matter, taking up no space, behind a lock.