The future is at hand
They say that the best way to predict the future is to create it. Which is exactly what is happening in the medical devices industry. Michael McQueen* explores the extraordinary technological developments in the healthcare sector.
With recent talk of driverless cars, robotic parcel delivery and AI-powered real-time language translation, it’s hard even for us in the present day to conceive the impact that automation will have over the coming years. As Amara’s Law tells us, while we humans can often overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, we tend to wildly underestimate its impact in the long term.
Of all the sectors that automation is set to transform in the coming years, medicine is perhaps the most exciting.
For instance, Google has recently developed a contact lens that contains a tiny glucose detector and wireless chip. These lenses can continuously monitor glucose levels in real time, making the maintenance and treatment of diabetes significantly less invasive and painful than current alternatives.
In a similar vein, Proteus Biomedical and Novartis have recently developed smart pills that monitor how the body is interacting with medications and transmit that data to your phone in real time.
New AI-powered diagnostic tools are revolutionising the detection of skin and cervical cancers in some exciting ways too. While examining Pap smear results can be time-consuming and costly, new automated imaging systems can scan samples rapidly and detect more than a hundred visual signs of cell abnormality. The computer then ranks the tests based on the likelihood of disease and, if risk factors are deemed high, passes the tests on to human pathologists to investigate further. This technology is achieving significantly more accurate results than human pathologists alone and roughly doubles the speed of processing tests.
On the treatment side, doctors have recently begun treating certain cancers with tiny robots that are temporarily inserted into the human body to release radiation.
Nanotechnology, the branch of technology that deals with the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules, is also having a significant impact on product design and functionality, with an estimated three to four nanotech products hitting the market every week. In the field of medicine, ‘Smart Dust’, an array of microscopic computers that can organise themselves inside the human body, can perform a wide range of functions. The applications of Smart Dust are almost unfathomable. Imagine swarms of these nanodevices, called ‘motes’, attacking early cancer or bringing pain relief to a wound. In the coming years, Smart Dust will enable doctors to essentially get inside your body without traditional surgical procedures at all.
The disruptive impact of medical automation
Despite all the medical possibilities that AI and nanotechnology present, there are a number of ways in which wide-scale automation will significantly disrupt the medical profession.
For instance, the primary role of medical doctors and their expertise is coming into question with the advent of IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Using AI, Watson is able to give accurate medical diagnoses without human help by drawing on its encyclopaedic brain.
A new player in the space, Alibaba Health, also recently unveiled an AI service for disease diagnosis called ‘Doctor You’. As an example of the power of this revolutionary technology, Doctor You can be used for medical image diagnosis of CT scans to identify early indicators of cancer.
According to Vice President of Ali Health Ke Yan, “Within the coming decade, AI will be capable of taking over half of the workload from doctors in China.”
In surgical wards, automation is proving to be a game changer too. A full 40% of robots currently sold worldwide are designed for surgical purposes. Every year the number of robotic surgeries is increasing by 30% and at the time of writing more than 1 million Americans have undergone robotic surgery.
The da Vinci robot is proving to be an enduring success story in automated surgery. When I was working with a key player in the medical device sector recently, they told me that as many as 80% of prostate surgeries today are done using some form of intervention by a robotic technology such as the da Vinci.
While some in the medical fraternity caution against a reliance on robots in the operating room, the reality is that many surgical robots are able to perform procedures with greater proficiency than humans. In New Zealand, a team of surgeons recently trialled the use of a robot to carry out a procedure to remove a throat tumour. This technology resulted in a far more accurate procedure that was less invasive and therefore led to faster recovery times for patients.
It’s pretty clear that medical progress is on the verge of significant change in the coming years due to AI-powered automation and robotics. Whether in a traditional operating theatre or at the most microscopic scale, these innovations will forever change the paradigm and profit models of traditional medicine. Some businesses, products and professionals will fall prey to the disruptive impact of these changes but we the patients will undoubtedly be the big winners.
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