According to the World Health Organization, around 10 per cent of global GDP is spent on health care, and, despite struggles against understandably rigid safeguards and legacy systems, health care is seeing some of the most dynamic, exciting and vital new ideas of any industry. From Francis Crick and James Watson’s first DNA double-helix model, through to Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe’s work with in-vitro fertilization, medical breakthroughs have a long history of shaping our societies, with effects that resonate far beyond the walls of any hospital.
Some of the most notable health-care disruption in recent years has come from the application of augmented reality (AR) and virtual-reality (VR) technologies; the deployment of big data to draw out life-saving analysis; and the creation of applications and devices to empower patients. These innovations take lessons from beyond the medical profession and apply them to a health-care setting, driving efficiency, lowering costs and, ultimately, saving lives.
VR is being used in a number of professions to improve training, and we have already seen VirtualSpeech being used to coach public speakers. But it’s perhaps nowhere more valuable than in the medical profession, where mistakes in a virtual world have far fewer consequences than in the real world. To that end, health tech start-up EchoPixel has designed an exploratory, consequences-free virtual space for surgeons to practise their skills on 3D-renderings of organs. Imagine a hi-tech, VR upgrade to Hasbro’s Operation game, minus the light-up nose.
This chapter also contains two of the most compelling VR innovations in this book, demonstrating the true breadth of potential uses for the technology. In Sweden, the pharmacy Apotek Hjärtat is now supplementing traditional pharmaceutical pain relief with a series of VR outdoor scenes called ‘Happy Place’, while DeepStream VR has created a virtual-reality game called COOL! to help reduce pain for burn victims. Using MRI scans, the game’s creators were able to prove conclusively a significant reduction in pain-related brain activity while people were using the game.
These innovations are just the start, and we expect to see a number of similar VR applications developed in health care over the coming years, for everything from pain relief to counselling. As the tools for gathering and analysing data have improved, private organizations and public services alike have sought to maximize the information at their disposal and the value they derive from it. In a health-care context, that means understanding in detail a patient’s needs, progress or limitations, and using those insights to improve their quality of life.
In the United Kingdom, Geneix is using big data to detect patients’ unique characteristics to recommend drug prescriptions with minimal side effects, while Tel Aviv-based start-up Zebra has developed an AI capable of diagnosing conditions in bones, the heart, liver, lungs and breasts from CT scans. Both can save vital time for already stretched medical practitioners, and potentially yield more accurate analysis, ultimately ensuring a better quality of care for patients.
Of course, the most effective way to save time and reduce the stress put upon doctors and nurses is to simply reduce the number of patients they see. To that end, there have been a number of devices looking to facilitate improved self-care and more accurate self-diagnosis, such as CliniCloud’s FDA approved kit for heart, lung and temperature monitoring.
Like CliniCloud, many of these home check-up devices can transmit data to a local family physician or hospital for review, and if this data can then be analysed by systems as intelligent as Geneix or Zebra, it will add up to significant time savings for hospital staff. This will inevitably lead to a better standard of patient care, while freeing up time for doctors and nurses to innovate for themselves in environments such as the MakerNurse space. Here they can explore ways to further free up resources and improve patient care, with the potential to build more home-diagnosis kits and methodologies in the creation of a virtuous circle.
As outlined in this book’s introduction, every innovation featured within these pages can be linked to another to inspire a sense of things to come. This is perhaps nowhere more true than in health care. Consider, as you read the following examples, how the ideas could be joined under one ecosystem, to create results that are greater than the sum of their parts.