The Digital Health Hype Circle 2019
For the third year in a row I would like to share my thoughts on what I see as the cutting edge, emerging, developing and mature technologies from around the digital health world visualised in a "Digital Health Hype Circle 2019" infographic.
Early Success
Haptic Technology - Haptic technology or kinesthetic communication recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user.
Bioimpedance Tech - Bioimpedance is a measure of how well the body impedes electric current flow. Fat has high resistivity, blood lower resistivity.
Personal Health Records - A personal health record (PHR) is a digital tool enabling individuals to manage and maintain their own healthcare, recording their own data, communicating with care services and accessing record.
HL7 FHIR V4 - HL7 International published the long-anticipated FHIR Release 4 (R4), allowing healthcare organizations to make new leaps forward in health data interoperability.
Oura Ring V2 - The Oura Ring 2 is an exciting ring-shaped health tracking device that measures something a little different from all the other calorie-focused trackers out there. In theory it can help you to feel better, perform better, and make smarter decisions regarding health and training.
Amazon Prime for Healthcare - Amazon has been making a series of moves into the healthcare space. Put them together and you have the outline of a plan for a radical shakeup of the industry.
Apple Skin ID - newly published patents for the Apple Watch suggests a novel form of biometric authentication that reads skin texture to identify a user.
Non Fungible Tokens (Crypto) - As healthcare becomes increasingly digitised, non-fungible tokens could play a major role in this transition, allowing for the goods and services of today to be rendered in a digital form.
Split Neural Networks - AI researchers have been advancing new techniques for training machine-learning models while keeping the data confidential. A split neural network allows one person to start training a deep-learning model and another person to finish.
BioHacking - Biohacking is a fairly new practice that could lead to major changes in our life. You could it call citizen or do-it-your-self biology. It takes place in small labs, mostly non-university — where all sorts of people get together to explore biology
Loneliness Tech - Loneliness technology aims to address the complex and usually unpleasant emotional responses to isolation. Loneliness typically includes anxious feelings about a lack of connection or communication with other beings, both in the present and extending into the future.
Decelerating Adoption
FemTech - (Female technology) is a term applied to a category of software, diagnostics, products, and services that use technology often to focus on women's health. This sector includes fertility solutions, period-tracking apps, pregnancy and nursing care, women’s sexual wellness, and reproductive system health care.
Swallowable Tech - typically ingestible sensors housed in pills designed to help patients adhere to the medications their doctors prescribe. Sensor are not powered by a battery, they are powered by the gut of the patient swallowing it, using technology discovered two centuries ago.
Wearable Breast Pumps - a wearable technology device typically connected to a smartphone app to monitor milk volume in real time, track pumping history for each breast and control the pump remotely.
Digital Contraceptives - typically a smartphone app collecting data and an algorithm analysing data to accurately identify ovulation cycles for women.
Digital Twin Technology - Healthcare is rapidly embracing digital twin technology. The goal of this trend is to deliver data-driven personalized medicine.Digital twins are built on computer-based, or in silico, models that are fed individual and population data.
Lack of Evidence
Blockchain - Blockchain technology applications in healthcare shows promise for solving issues such as its used in EHR distribution of data and nationwide interoperability. However, more research, trials and experiments must be carried out to ensure a secure and established system is implanted before using blockchain technology on a large scale in healthcare.
Robotics - Robots are everywhere from science fiction to your local hospital, where they are changing healthcare. Robots in medicine help by relieving medical personnel from routine tasks, that take their time away from more pressing responsibilities, and by making medical procedures safer and less costly for patients.
Hololens - also known as Project Baraboo, is a pair of mixed reality smartglasses developed and manufactured by Microsoft. HoloLens gained popularity for being one of the first computers running the Windows Mixed Reality platform under the Windows 10 operating system.
Speech Recognition - Speech recognition is the inter-disciplinary sub-field of computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition, computer speech recognition or speech to text.
High Potential
Secure Chat (Patient to Doctor) - enables healthcare companies to empower care providers, patients, and app users to communicate securely over messaging and therefore to receive care and advice about personal health through the convenience of their mobile devices.
Remote Testing - is a form of telemedicine service, which allows constant monitoring of a patient’s condition and the performance of preventive and control check-ups outside the hospital environment.
Machine Learning - Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and deep learning are taking the healthcare industry by storm. They are not pie in the sky technologies any longer; they are practical tools that can help companies optimise their service provision, improve the standard of care, generate more revenue, and decrease risk.
AI Symptom Checkers - A symptom checker is a system allowing the detection of any subjective evidence of an ailment or medical condition. Subjective evidence is defined as a symptom, as only patients can discover them. The symptom checker may be run by the user/patient or with the assistance of medical personnel, as symptoms are, by definition, known to the patient only.
Peak Interest
TeleHealth - Telehealth involves the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long distance patient/clinician contact and care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring and remote admissions.
Online Triage - typically a digital platform improving patient access to healthcare, directing them to the most appropriate care, reducing the need for appointments and increasing efficiency for clinicians and administrators.
Remote Monitoring - Remote patient monitoring is a technology to enable monitoring of patients outside of conventional clinical settings, which may increase access to care and decrease healthcare delivery costs. Incorporating RPM in chronic disease management can significantly improve an individual's quality of life.
Connected Devices - a smart device generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols such as Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi, 3G, etc., that can operate to some extent interactively and autonomously.
Previous Digital Health Hype Circles can be found by clicking on the links below ..
