
When Steven Burrell addressed the AdvaMed 2008 conference, a medical technology conference in Washington, it would seem that he was writing part of a plot to the movie. He said that medicine will soon be so advanced that you will walk into a Wal-Mart like store, give a sample of your blood, and leave with a bag that contains the cures for everything that could be wrong with you. This of course is a very general idea, but one that may be plausible. Medicine has advanced at an alarming rate in the past 50 years, and if it continues along the same evolutionary path will one day reach this potential. He said that soon our cloths will be filled with senors and probes that will monitor our health. Most of the technology is already around, people just need to find a cheap and practical use for it. Nike has already partnered with Apple to create a senor that fits in some Nike brand shoes that monitors different things when your running. The possibilities for this new industry are endless, and will undoubtably lengthen the life expetency around the world.
Medicine as well as other customer service based technologies will become increasingly more personalized in the future. The concept of using genetic mapping to identify patients by their genomes is an interesting thought. Perhaps patients of the future could wear small color coded tattoos or have embedded microchips that identify their genome and serious medical problems. Tattoo artists of the future could personalize the colored genome tattoos that future people wear routinely. EMTs and physicians of the future may be able to retrieve a patient’s entire medical history and drug allergy information from scanning an implanted microchip. You could throw away the old bracelet that tells medical professionals you are diabetic, that information would be part of your implanted medical microchip. Your emergency contact information would also be readily available from your medical implant. New businesses and technology will arise to safeguard your private microchip information in the future of personalized medicine.
ReplyDeleteInteresting concept, I wonder what doctors will think about this. If you can simply walk into a convenience store, get blood taken, and walk out with a prescription, there would be no need to visit a physician. Would this lower or increase healthcare costs? Who would be liable if the wrong medicine was distributed and no doctor was involved? I do think this would be convenient, but is it smart? Not so sure about that.
ReplyDeleteI’m not quite sure if having a Wal-mart type factory, people coming and going through a revolving door, is the best form of healthcare. However, if they can just take a peak at our blood and see what could be medically wrong with you immediately that would be amazing. Also, if our clothes and shoes could gather and report information about your health, couldn’t that be viewed as a big brother type of intrusion? I can foresee parents forcing their children to wear these types of clothes. Life would definitely not be normal growing up anymore. There just seems to be just as many drawbacks as there are positives to so many of these future technologies.
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