Читать книгу The Future of Health - Roberto Ascione - Страница 7

Digital technologies are part of our life flow. We use them to study and work, to connect with people, and also to do our grocery shopping, entertain ourselves, and find love. Health is not an exception albeit it is a much more recent discovery.

Through the usage of social media and other digital platforms we constantly create and nurture our digital footprint, often passively or without recognizing it. Despite this, many of these information or data points are relevant for our own health, even if we are not yet leveraging them to the fullest.

Cheaper, smaller, faster computers together with ever-evolving form factors from laptop to wearable and beyond have been enabling all-new use cases and practices, showing us that it is possible to quantify our health experiences. Over time, this has inspired a continuous evolution of personal medical devices, adding an objective and quantitative dimension to health and medicine that was completely unheard of only 10 years ago.

Novel technologies also unlocked access to the human genome, popularizing a practice which, only few years back, was extremely expensive and available only to academia and primary research. In other words, for a few hundred dollars we can get our full genome mapping, and for even less we can investigate our genetic set-up regarding specific areas or conditions.

This unprecedented amount of data, originated both by digital and genetic signals, needed completely new strategies and computer-science solutions, which we often refer to as AI, to make sense of them.

AI and more appropriately data science are not only giving order to this vast amount of data but are also allowing us to correlate it with medical observations, unveiling connections and cause–effect implications which, in certain cases, we did not even imagine in the past.

Once these connections are scientifically proven, we can start to introduce them into the medical practice, often allowing for predictions of future evolution of certain disease states even before such a disease would develop.

Most of these innovations are coming from what we now identify as digital health startups, brave teams of young innovators and experienced professionals, often including doctors and other health-care professionals, engineers, designers, and patients, who are not afraid to challenge the status quo of health care and the implied inaccessibility, inconvenience, and uncertainty that are huge problems in the industry. This movement has been increasingly fueled by venture capital investments, which have been propelling this sector since 2011 and further accelerated through the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

All of this is having a profound impact on health care and its determinates, including health literacy, access to care, ability to connect to the right health-care resources, cost of diagnoses and therapies, prevention strategies, and more.

The first section of this book will review the most important technology innovations and provide examples of startups using them to foster this radical transformation of health care as we know it.