With innovations like biofeedback, AR surgery, on-demand care and more, technology is helping improve medical care. Tom Merritt lists five things to know about digital health.
The world got very focused on health recently. Technology is being developed to improve health, so maybe we can focus on it a little less. Here are five trends in digital health.
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- Biofeedback. Several companies are racing to develop better ways to detect health issues and alert you immediately based on data collected from wearables. Most of these developments are around heart conditions.
- Augmented reality surgery. AR and VR have been used in training for a few years now. A company called Augmedics is developing an augmented reality system to use in actual surgeries. Essentially overlaying the view from a screen onto the patient in real time with the aim of improving accuracy over freehand surgery.
- On-demand care. Health services like Carbon Health use virtual visits and online scheduling to let patients get help in less than a day.
- Assisted diagnosis. Machine learning won't let us have autonomous robot surgeons anytime soon, but it can help actual human doctors detect things earlier and with more precision. MammoScreen can help identify areas for radiologists to look at in mammograms and reduce false positives. Another company called CompanionMX gathers data from a patient's smartphone to assist in mental health diagnoses.
- Predictive healthcare. Data analysis can help healthcare companies anticipate when an outbreak will happen and plan accordingly. Even non-healthcare companies can use data to predict when they might lose more workers to sick days and staff accordingly.
That's just the tip of the iceberg in health tech, but hopefully this article will give you an idea of where the sector is going.
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