‘Medicalized’ smartphones to put health information in hands of sufferers

The world is on the verge of a 4^th industrial revolution, featured by artificial intelligence, robots, big data, and thorough learning and analytics, but medicine is yet stuck at the start of the 3^rd industrial revolution, which has already brought digital abilities to billions of persons globally.

That is the contention of Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and chief academic officer of Scripps Health in La Jolla, Calif., who claims that the digital revolution has been appearing since the middle of the previous century. Even so, the healthcare industry sustains to just minimally leverage IT.

Although, Topol, a practicing cardiologist at the Scripps Health observes mobile tools as the technological enabler for the “democratization” of medicine by offering sufferers control of their own health information, which has historically, been the key domain of all doctors.

Clients are “moving from passengers to co-pilots,” challenging the conventional “doctor knows best” mindset among physicians, in accordance to Topol. Initially, medicine has been reluctant to make such alterations.

Nevertheless, with more than 80% of U.S. adults owning smartphones, he considers healthcare is on the cusp of a significant shift in who controls information. That transformation of control will effectively move power from physicians to sufferers, who will play a dramatically more key role in their own care. In the future, clients armed with mobile phones will accumulate information from wearable sensors to stop or better treat health situations, Topol stated, with these tools facilitating the role of a digital medical assistant.

On-demand the medicine is the core element of the future, and face-to-face office visits are going to become the minority of physician-sufferer communication moving forward, Topol assumed. In fact, he discussed that the sufferer’s bedroom will become the hub of remote monitoring, giving continuous detecting of vital symptoms from the home, as well as virtual consultations through telehealth-enabled smartphones. “The telemedicine revolution has ultimately arrived, and it is moving towards prime time.”

In accordance to Topol, a professor of genomics, mobile health technology won’t just markedly cut healthcare prices but will put personalized medicine in the hands of sufferers by contextualizing the information they produce in their real world, not merely the office of doctor.

“In a small droplet of blood, there is much information,” Topol analyzed, which can be tested at home by clients. “It is not merely blood. It could be also the sweat, urine, and breath.” There is going to be pocketing DNA sequencers the size of a flash drive that persons will utilize immensely, he assumed. “They already exist now-a-days.”

Additionally, clients today can order a mobile tool through Amazon for $69 and conduct a cardiogram anytime they need “when they feel that is something’s not correct, when they are dizzy or when they feel their heart is racing,” he stated. An algorithm embedded in the smartphone software updates sufferers on their heart rhythm, which can “preempt having to go to an emergency room when most of the period (the condition of person) is normal.”

By wearing a small sensor on the arm or abdomen connected to a smartphone, diabetic sufferers can get glucose readings every 5 minutes, in accordance to Topol. Further, he claimed that an experimental contact lens being established by Google can painlessly measure glucose levels in tears, replacing the finger sticks that millions of persons with diabetes utilize to draw blood.

For persons with Parkinson’s disease, Topol disclosed that there is a free app that, at any moment in period, quantifies an individual’s tremor, voice, and gait to assist to evaluate whether they should take their medication and in what dose.

Additionally, ear infections are a usual reason for parents to take their kids to the pediatrician. Although, he stated that mothers and fathers can utilize their smartphones to diagnose their kid’s ear infection through the cloud with an algorithm that investigates images for the availability of fluid trapped in the middle ear.

Hospital-based sleep studies, which are believed to be among the top revenue drivers for several health networks, could also be a thing of the past in Topol’s emerging app economy. He inquired: How many persons would go to a sleep lab and pay $4,000 for a sleep research when you can take a sensor in a reusable Band-Aid that charges $1 to make and gains nearly all of the similar information?

When it comes to other modern sensor technology, Topol stated that it is now possible to observe sweat and physiologic metrics with skin sensors. “For instance, exposure to the proposed pesticides and even things such as nitric oxide which could assume an asthma attack.”