The medical and healthcare industry is possibly changing at the fastest rate among all the verticals. Almost on a daily basis, we get to hear about a new invention/development/announcement by one of the leaders in the industry. I have picked 10 interesting developments that has happened in recent times in medical field that has the impact of touching our lives in the long term.Overall the trend is towards – Simpler, Less painful and Connected.
- 3-D printing – Like any other industry, 3D printing will swamp the medical world also. 3D printing will be used to print-out quick prototypes of implants, surgical tools, Dental footprints or even unborn babies. Unbelievable, but true! An American start-up has combined ultrasound imaging, 3-D printing and Sculpturing to produce a 3-D sculpture of an unborn baby from the 3D/4D ultrasound images taken during the 23-32 Week.
- Wireless pacemakers – For decades, wired pacemakers that are implanted under the skin of the chest and send electric pulses to heart’s chambers by electric wires, worked well for many patients and helped saved millions of lives. However, there were reports of wires getting tangled, broken, infected and other problems. Now the age has come for wireless pacemakers that do not contain any wires and is directly implanted in the right ventricle. The initial patient trials have been successful and one of the devices has been approved by FDA recently. If this continues, the pacemaker industry is in for a change forever.
- Probe free Ultrasound – Recently a leading medical device manufacturer has launched an ultrasound machine that does not require a probe for doing ultrasound. This alleviates one big problem associated with ultrasound process – dependence on the capabilities of the technician. The whole process can be automated and clubbed together with advanced 3D imaging techniques to produce very reliable results.
- Mobile based diagnostics – Already several solutions are available in market that can do an ultrasound on mobile, analyse breathing irregularities using a smartphone, and detect cases of hypertension and so on. There is a definite trend towards producing technologies that will take medical devices outside of the realm of hospitals and use handheld devices to perform several tasks.
- A painless method of blood collection and testing – If the sight of a long needle going into veins and drawing 2-3 tubes of blood gives you sleepless night, then a solution is one the way. Theranos has developed a needless way of collecting blood from your fingertip and most of tests it does require much less blood that needed by traditional techniques. In fact, some tests can be completed with just a single drop of blood. This is in in line with the trend of making use of medical devices less painful.
- Needle free Blood Glucose Testing – Another one on less painful to use. People who have diabetes or who have seen their parents struggling will diabetes know that for a diabetic patient’s blood glucose levels need to be regularly monitored. This means regular pricking of fingers to draw blood. Continuous blood monitors somehow alleviated this problem of regular pricking, but not completely. All that is bound to change now. A company is developing a patch that has a transdermal biosensor that reads bloods analytes through the skin without drawing blood. The sensor collects the data at fixed intervals and sends it wireless to a remote monitor.
- New forms of Radiation Therapy – For cancer patients, radiation has proved be a life-saver. It has been able to treat many forms of cancer at different stages successfully. There have been new advancements in radiation therapy making the process more and more effective. Hope this trend will continue and the treatments will become more affordable in coming future.
- Home Healthcare – In the cases of chronic illness and in cases where treatment is prohibitively expensive if it goes for a long time, home healthcare is the best solution. Through the use of connectivity technologies and other advanced technologies, the complete patient care can be taken care in the comforts of the house. As the global population gets older, this trend will become more and more prominent.
- Hospital interconnectivity – There is a strong push towards integrating the EHR/EMR records of patients across hospitals to simplify the process of generating, storing and fetching of patients’ data. Although there are security concerns around this, all of the data will get integrated in next 3-4 years’ timeframe.
- Connected Medical devices – Already, many devices are available that support in-built connectivity to external networks to simplify the operations, provide real-time control and simplify the diagnostics of the devices. Again there are some serious concerns in this area, however, it is widely believed that more and more devices will become connected in the near future.
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