The efforts that technology has put in place to improve our health conditions and our life expectancy seem to prepare for the great leap, causing a substantial transformation in the way we treat ourselves and stay healthy for a long time. Here are the changes we should prepare for, and if they do not arrive quickly we should press for them to happen:
- Loanable Telemedicine: Telemedicine services, 'lighter' consultations that can be delivered via telephone or internet, now have an excellent propensity for monitoring. It is possible to keep an eye on professionals and their volume of consultations, and at the same time save a lot of money from the healthcare budget to be allocated to infrastructures, with management costs much lower than those necessary to support a total study activity . From a common sense estimate made by evaluating the proportions of red, yellow and green codes in the emergency room, 70% of 'in the flesh' consultations could easily take place remotely.
- Prevention medicine: The ever-increasing knowledge of the critical factors capable of generating the onset of pathologies will give more and more space to the 'preventive' branch of Medicine. Even if it seems bad to say, in the future we will probably take more drugs and active ingredients when 'healthy' than after getting sick, with further savings for the health coffers. Why spend a boatload of money if with half the investment I can completely avoid an illness?
Even one of these changes would suffice to produce a chain reaction with significant results, which would also produce a huge increase in some of the most promising trends in medicine, areas already in strong development and capable of significantly improving the quality of our lives without 'inconveniencing' nanotechnologies:
- Biological sensors, systems capable of monitoring our health conditions (electronic patches that let us know the amount of glucose in the blood in real time). Other major developments are expected in the field of sensors capable of 'following' us everywhere and throughout the day, providing doctors with our encephalogram and useful information to assist us;
- Tracking systems, which are already invading (in a very embryonic form) our market: think of all the systems capable of 'tracking' our sleep (to see if we snore or breathe well) or the dozens of electronic gadgets capable of acting as 'trainers' ' in our daily jogging sessions, recording our performances and transmitting them online, creating a 'group' of like-minded people who exchange advice and help each other to achieve a common goal.
- Mobile app, real self-diagnostic tests increasingly developed to increase awareness of our body and attention to symptoms that a few years ago would have been ignored.
Will the future be a doctor who can fit in a pocket if necessary? It seems so.
[Youtube] ec-FQvpNisI [/ youtube]
