Your Smart TV As Telemedicine Platform – This And More News In Digital Health This Week
Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD
Director of The Medical Futurist Institute (Keynote Speaker, Researcher, Author & Futurist)
I have never stopped being amazed by human creativity and scientific progress. That is why I still get enthusiastic about yet another digital health tool or a device that enables patients to become empowered. And as these devices become even more diverse, they continue to offer more and more solutions, ultimately supporting patients actually becoming the point of care. Smart TVs as telemedical platforms are yet another example of such innovation.
For me, digital health is a dream come true – and my goal is to share my enthusiasm with you. Join my upcoming live Q&A about the latest healthcare trends in artificial intelligence. Let's look at what 2022 might bring!
Take care,
Berci
A robot has performed laparoscopic surgery on the soft tissue of a pig without the guiding hand of a human—a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University said they can automate one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in surgery: the reconnection of two ends of an intestine.
Soft-tissue surgery is especially hard for robots because of its unpredictability, forcing them to be able to adapt quickly to handle unexpected obstacles. This robot has a novel control system that can adjust the surgical plan in real-time, just as a human surgeon would.
Smart televisions indeed could serve as remote care platforms for the masses, adding to the democratisation of healthcare. Tech companies and other players are already tasting the water (=consumers' reactions) to such solutions, and I'm sure there will be more examples on the market soon.
This seems to be the end of IBM's moonshot ambitions in healthcare, aiming for minimising the losses. Watson was the subject of a lot of early hype, of course, with not a few big promises about its potential for AI-enabled clinical decision support. And over the past decade, IBM has spent billions scooping up businesses to build out the Watson Health portfolio. But challenges with Watson have been well documented – and they were plenty.
This one is so important I want to share it again. And I certainly do hope that the buyer will be able to find Watson's space in the healthcare ecosystem.
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A French surgeon faces legal action after he tried to sell an X-ray of one of his patient's injuries as a digital artwork without her consent. The senior surgeon at a Paris hospital put the image of a woman's forearm with a Kalashnikov bullet lodged near the bone up for sale online as an NFT. The listing said she had been shot in the arm during the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris which left 130 people dead.
This one is undoubtedly one of the weirdest stories I've read recently. But it's important to note that it's a perfect example of human error or misconduct – it has nothing to do with any technology, including NFTs.
MedTech giant Royal Philips is rolling out a new at-home ECG system for decentralized clinical trial use. The company is pitching this new technology as a way for clinical trial participants to record ECG data without travelling to a clinical site or requiring an in-home clinician. Philips noted that the move towards more home-based monitoring tools could improve clinical trial attrition rates.
While in silico clinical trials are not here yet, it makes a lot of sense to use the data of the most underused resource of healthcare: patients themselves.
MORE NEWS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE
LOW-FIELD MRIs – Low-Field MRI for New Imaging Possibilities, Fewer X-rays
A.I. SCANNING EYES – A.I. Can Identify Heart Disease From An Eye Scan
LONGEVITY – A $3bn Bet On Finding The Fountain Of Youth
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Thank you,
Berci