This book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler professes the exponential timelines of Ray Kurzweil and the remarkable inventions, technologies, philanthropists, and the BoP (bottom of pyramid) rising billions of people.
Looking for eHealth content is not that hard. Diamandis started the X Prize foundation and there is a competition for a mobile medical device that will diagnose a patient faster and with more accuracy than a human, based on the inspiration of the Star Trek Tricorder, which I blogged about before. We almost have IBM's Dr. Watson doing alot of that (on the cloud for everybody), but not with the X-rays, ultrasound, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.
I have heard a lot of these stories before in the news - the internet pommels us everyday with these stories, but still some of them remain most startling and inspirational. Take for example "Lab on a Chip":
"Harvard professor George M. Whitesides, a leader in this emerging field explains: 'We now have drugs to treat many diseases, from AIDS and malaria to tuberculosis. What we desperately need is accurate, low-cost, easy-to-use, point-of-care diagnostics designed specifically for the sixty percent of the developing world that lives beyond the reach of urban hospitals and medical infrastructures. This is what Lab-on-a-Chip technology can deliver.'
Because LOC technology will likely be part of a wireless device, the data it collects for diagnostic purposes can be uploaded to a cloud and anlayzed for deeper patterns. 'For the first time,' says Dr. Anita Goel, a professor at MIT who company Nanobiosym is working hard to commercialize LOC technology, 'we'll have the ability to provide real-time, worldwide disease information that can be uploaded to the cloud and used for detecting and combating the early phase of pandemics'.
There is a whole chapter on Healthcare. I didn't know Diamandis also had an MD. Another great story is zero-cost diagnostics, and the discovery by Carlos Camara that Scotch tape can be used for X-Rays - the Tribogenics X-Ray Pixel. There was a great story about in Nature.
There are other stories/inventions/visions in the book that caught my attention:
"The impacts of mobile telephony on health stretch from being able to quickly locate the nearest doctor to a smart phone app invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope, and has since been downloaded by over 3 million doctors. And it is only one of 6,000 health care apps now available through Apple."
No comments:
Post a Comment