Tech Trends Report reveals revolutionary healthcare innovations
The latest annual "2019 Tech Trends Report -- Emerging science and technology trends that will influence business, government, education, media and society in the coming year" from the Future Today Institute – details several healthcare technology innovations that could be shaping how care is given and received this year and beyond.
Smart threads with embedded sensory and electronic features, tatooables that monitor and deliver medicine, and wireless body area networks are just a few of the dozens of technologies scientists are working on.
Smart thread: Think of “smart thread” as a sort of temporary, smart system that connects to a smartphone or other medical device and reports on your glucose levels, diagnoses an infection and alerts hospital staff if your body is chemically out of balance. Researchers at Tufts University have embedded nano-scale sensors and electronics into surgical thread, that can be used for suturing. Meantime, at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, researchers are experimenting with smart threads that can change color. These non-surgical threads are coated with thermochromic paint that changes color when jolted with electricity. Smart thread is just coming out of experimentation, but initial tests results show that it can be successfully used as a diagnostic device. Researcher working on smart thread include Tufts University; University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information; Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute.
Tattooables: Tatooables - temporary skin that can store data and deliver drugs - have entered trials. Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science and Seoul National University in South Korea, the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Tokyo, Stanford and the University of California at San Diego are all working on electronic second skins. MC10 has already created microscopic, organic semiconductors and carbon nanotubes that stretch and flex and can be powered wirelessly. Called BioStampRC, it’s far thicker than a tattooable, but the idea is the same - and it’s only a matter of time before the technology shrinks.
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs): WBANs communicate information from a wearable device back to medical servers, app manufacturers and a patient’s home computer. Sensors, such as devices to monitor heart rate or oxygen level, collect data and send it back to a central hub (most often a smartphone) which then relays the information to a medical team or healthcare monitoring service. There are a lot of benefits: rather than moving into an assisted living facility or spending a lot of time in the hospital, patients can instead move back home while being provided with virtual care. While some of the established medical devices use strong encryption algorithms, many new wearable devices don’t. They’re sending a lot of unencrypted, unsecured personal data – including our locations – across the Internet. As the hacking community becomes more sophisticated, it’s started targeting hospitals and clinics. The US Department of Homeland Security has been investigating several cybersecurity cases related to WBANs.
Get the full 2019 Tech Report at the Future Today Institute.
