Health Tech – when technology revolutionizes medicine

           Medicine has changed a lot in a very short time, as there have been many rapid developments of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, medical imaging, and other technologies and techniques which help humans to have a better and longer life. However, as societies around the world age, the demand for medicine is also increasing. This is where ‘Health Tech’ comes in, a collaboration between those who work in medicine, science, and start-ups in fields such as communication and artificial intelligence. It aims to create a new form of medicine that can respond to patients’ needs and is incredibly advanced!

Medicine is accessible for everybody with Telemedicine
           With the number of patients constantly on the rise, it is not easy for everyone to have access to effective treatment, and that is why telemedicine has been introduced. This is a new technique that will help people who live in a remote area to be able to easily and quickly access help from specialists through mobile applications or the internet. One example is “mHealth” which is an application created by the World Health Organization. This app helps doctors in remote areas of Tanzania to take care of malaria patients, or doctors in other African countries to take care of HIV patients. As the world moves towards the era of 5G communications, telemedicine has become more and more effective.

When VR is used to treat patients
           Who would have thought that the Virtual Reality (VR) seen on games or TV could also be used for real in the medical field? There are 240 hospitals in the US that have started using VR.. It is mostly used to help improve patients’ emotional state, help them calm down, or distract their attention from pain. VR is even used to treat people with anxiety and phobias, and can also be used to provide a detailed demonstration of different medical procedures.

More effective medicine with AI
           The most fascinating technology in 2019 must be none other than Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has been adopted in many medical fields, such as assisting doctors to diagnose, using medical and statistical data, helping them to create individual treatment plans by using a patient’s medical history, and now even helping diagnose cancer! A collaboration between Google and the Northwestern University Medical Research Institute has developed a Google AI that has been able to make a lung cancer diagnosis from CT scan image results of more than 15,000 patients in the form of 42,290 lung images. It turned out that AI was 5% more accurate than human doctors and reduced the chance of error by 11%. If this is used with real patients, it can help doctors detect early stages of cancer more easily which will increase the success rate of the treatment.

Never stop developing with Quantum Computing
           Computers working on a Quantum system can store a large amount of data and process it even faster with the Qubit unit. Therefore, it is very suitable for analyzing complex data, such as human DNA. In the past it took both computers and many scientists to analyze and compare a lot of genome codes to find genetic abnormalities, however, with Quantum Computing, we can analyze and store data more efficiently. Meanwhile the capability for rapid analysis means Quantum systems can be used to develop medications by decreasing the overall time required for drug development.

           You can see that Health Tech is everywhere now – starting from your first step into a hospital, to having treatment, and then recuperating at home. It is another important innovation that we all should keep an eye on, as it has the potential to improve the quality of life for many people, allowing us to be healthy and prolonging our time with those we love.

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