By Tosin Joseph

In early 2020’s, COVID-19 was the reset button to the world, and it ended up ushering us into full digital transformation. Tech-integrated healthcare is the next frontier. This is so with the advent of mobile medical apps, digiceuticals, AI-powered clinical decision support screening and diagnosis, remote monitoring, digitisation of health data, and AI-powered wearable that will aid the shift towards preventive healthcare. 

As an emerging tech researcher and tech trend watcher, here are some of the disruptions and predictions that will shape the healthcare landscape from 2024 and beyond:  

AI will power the rise of mobile diagnostics, digital health apps and life-saving chatbots. AI will create and power new apps, tools and tests that will bring diagnostic information to right to the patient bedside. The new smartphones with AI-powered apps will be able to carry out medical scans, analyse images, coughs, vitals, urine samples, detect infections etc. The future of medicine will be driven by healthcare apps and life-saving chatbots! The engagement of AI-powered health apps will be empowering the patients, enabling the doctors, enhancing wellness, and curing the well before they get sick (Dr. Daniel Kraft on Future Medicine).  

AI will drive the shift from “Hospital to Home-spital”. The point of care will move rapidly into the home front. People will monitor their heart conditions, detect concussions, monitor the progress of diseases, and check up on moles or ear infections using apps, smartphones, and sensors (The Economist, March 2nd, 2017).

AI will drive more insights towards longevity and aging reversal research. Currently, we have different cutting-edge research projects in aging science. E.g., The Scheibye-Knudsen Lab is using advanced machine learning to crunch the data from 1.04 billion prescriptions to understand the impact of drugs on human lifespan. According to a report by Time Magazine that “Scientists Have Reached a Key Milestone in Learning How to Reverse Aging”. This is a positive endeavour towards longevity.

AI will cause a shift around healthcare accessibility away from our conventional slower and expensive access to a faster, smaller, and cheaper healthcare access. This will be made possible by AI-powered health apps which will reduce appointment time, laboratory testing and result time lag, insufficient manpower etc.

AI will cause a shift from “sick care to healthcare”, “physical to virtual”, “one size fits all to personalised”, “healthcare provider to a crowd-sourced system”, “human cognition to AI-enhanced”, “fee for Service to fee for outcome” “from episodic to continuous” (Dr. Daniel Kraft on Future of Health and Medicine). 

AI will power more robotic possibilities within the healthcare space. According to Science daily, researchers have succeeded in printing a robotic hand with bones, ligaments and tendons made of different polymers using a new laser scanning technique. This opens completely new possibilities to produce soft robotic structures.

AI will revolutionise healthcare delivery. Over the years it has been more of human-to-human interaction in healthcare delivery; soon we will begin to experience the use of machine intelligence (apps, virtual, wearables etc) to deliver this. Before now, it was healthcare providers (hospitals) delivering healthcare services through technology but going forward, it will be healthcare providers becoming a tech company delivering healthcare through technology! (Olakunle Soriyan, Global Thought Leader at the NEXT365 Indaba January 2018). This is so according to TechCrunch with the rise of health tech start-ups with innovations like the Mediwhale’s Reti-CVD, an AI-powered retinal diagnostic solution that assesses the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in patients while avoiding radiation exposure entirely. 

AI will revolutionise the healthcare space around future pandemic management with the rise of AI-powered tools that can predicts viral mutations which could guide treatments for COVID-19 and other future pandemic. According to The Next Web, EVEscape for example is an AI-powered tool developed at Harvard Medical School and Oxford University that accurately predicted the most concerning the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the pandemic. EVEscape also helps to rapidly determine the threat level of the new strains. This will be a great possibility of AI in the public health space.

AI will power the drive on wearable technology. Different types of wearable devices (smart watches, smart rings etc) often incorporate AI-ML. Wearable is now being integrated into health monitoring, clinical diagnosis, and administrative approvals for new therapies. According to Bloomberg, the wearable market will grow to $76 billion by 2028.

I believe with the help of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies; TECHNOLOGY will be able to add years to life and life to years.

Tosin is an Emerging Tech Researcher and Consultant exploring how emerging technologies are shaping our world. An Alumni of Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom. He can be reached via [email protected].