Trends Identified
Health monitoring will move beyond the clinical setting, closer to you
Health sensors will appear more frequently in everyday items such as mobile phones or toilets, wearables (e.g., clothing, jewelry – even skin); in a multifunctional “tricorder” (hand-held diagnostic device); or as part of a “lab-on-a-chip” that people may soon keep in their medicine cabinets. The process
for self-monitoring of health indicators, as well as monitoring of healthy or unhealthy behaviours, will be simpler and more routine. When diagnostic data is networked, AI-augmented and relayed to clinicians, round-the-clock remote care becomes possible. As brain-computer interface (BCI) tools bring greater awareness of mental states, the brain-body connection underlying addictions, illness and treatment will present new options (e.g., neurostimulation, neuro-enhancing drugs, or simply behaviour change).
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
Health innovations will shape health outcomes
Innovations in the health field will bring together the technological process of inventing new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tools, with profound impact on the health systems of developing countries.
2011
Africa in 50 Years’ Time
African Development Bank
Health care providers will cover your groceries.
A lot more than what happens in a doctor’s office affects health outcomes. “If you're sitting at home with no job, it's going to impact your health, whether that's the mental stress, whether that starts to create high blood pressure, early signs of hypertension,” explains Kaiser Permanente chairman and CEO Bernard Tyson. Same if you can’t afford balanced meals or if violence in your community stops you going out and exercising. That’s pushing health care companies to step out of their lane and start new programs. Geisinger, a health care system covering the poorest counties in Pennsylvania, started a “fresh food pharmacy”, providing patients with groceries, nutrition information and cooking classes, says its president and CEO, Dr. Jaewon Ryu. “Whether commercial insurers start paying for those programs or not, I think it depends on how innovative and receptive they are to the growing body of evidence,” he adds.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Health
The past century has delivered remarkable advances in health, as is illustrated by the increase of 4.7 years (male) and 5.1 years (female) to the average global life expectancy at birth between 1990 and 2010. However, translating public health knowledge into practice has been fragmented and fraught with difficulty. Whilst biomedical technology and capacity to enhance the quality of health care and prevention have improved significantly, access to health care remains vastly lopsided, with the poor and disadvantaged suffering a disproportionate burden of illness and disease.
2013
Now for the long term - The Report of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations
Oxford Martin School
Heads and Hearts
The Global Risks Report tends to deal with structural issues: systems under stress, institutions that no longer match the challenges facing the world, adverse impacts of policies and practices. All these issues entail widespread human costs in terms of psychological and emotional strain. This is usually left implicit but it deserves more attention—and not only because declining psychological and emotional well-being is a risk in itself. It also affects the wider global risks landscape, notably via impacts on social cohesion and politics.
2019
The Global Risks Report 2019 14th Edition
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Harvesting clean water from air
The ability to extract clean water from air is not new, however existing techniques require high moisture levels and a lot of electricity. This is changing. A team from MIT and University of California, Berkeley has successfully tested a process using porous crystals that convert the water using no energy at all. Another approach, by a start-up called Zero Mass Water from Arizona is able to produce 2-5 litres of water a day based on an off-grid solar system.
2017
These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2017
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Harnessing hyperscale: Hardware is back (and never really went away)
Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in software, the hardware world is again a hotbed of new development as demand soars for bigger, faster, lower-cost data centers. Does your IT organization understand the new developments allowing companies to realize the benefits of “hyperscale” systems? In this new world, hardware matters more than ever in transforming enterprises into digital businesses with access to unlimited computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.
2014
Accenture Technology Vision 2014
Accenture
Harnessing hyperscale: Hardware is back (and never really went away)
Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in software, the hardware world is again a hotbed of new development as demand soars for bigger, faster, lower-cost data centers. Does your IT organization understand the new developments allowing companies to realize the benefits of “hyperscale” systems? In this new world, hardware matters more than ever in transforming enterprises into digital businesses with access to unlimited computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.
2014
Accenture Technology Vision 2014
Accenture
Gut probe in a pill
A small, swallowable device captures detailed images of the gut without anesthesia, even in infants and children. Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) may be one of the costliest diseases you’ve never heard of. Marked by inflamed intestines that are leaky and absorb nutrients poorly, it’s widespread in poor countries and is one reason why many people there are malnourished, have developmental delays, and never reach a normal height. No one knows exactly what causes EED and how it could be prevented or treated. Practical screening to detect it would help medical workers know when to intervene and how. Therapies are already available for infants, but diagnosing and studying illnesses in the guts of such young children often requires anesthetizing them and inserting a tube called an endoscope down the throat. It’s expensive, uncomfortable, and not practical in areas of the world where EED is prevalent. So Guillermo Tearney, a pathologist and engineer at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, is developing small devices that can be used to inspect the gut for signs of EED and even obtain tissue biopsies. Unlike endoscopes, they are simple to use at a primary care visit. Tearney’s swallowable capsules contain miniature microscopes. They’re attached to a flexible string-like tether that provides power and light while sending images to a briefcase-like console with a monitor. This lets the health-care worker pause the capsule at points of interest and pull it out when finished, allowing it to be sterilized and reused. (Though it sounds gag-inducing, Tearney’s team has developed a technique that they say doesn’t cause discomfort.) It can also carry technologies that image the entire surface of the digestive tract at the resolution of a single cell or capture three-dimensional cross sections a couple of millimeters deep. The technology has several applications; at MGH it’s being used to screen for Barrett’s esophagus, a precursor of esophageal cancer. For EED, Tearney’s team has developed an even smaller version for use in infants who can’t swallow a pill. It’s been tested on adolescents in Pakistan, where EED is prevalent, and infant testing is planned for 2019.The little probe will help researchers answer questions about EED’s development—such as which cells it affects and whether bacteria are involved—and evaluate interventions and potential treatments. —Courtney Humphries
2019
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019 - How we’ll invent the future, by Bill Gates
MIT Technology Review
Growth, but not as we know it
If 2014 taught us anything it’s that in our increasingly technology-led world, no industry, no company and no government, even, is immune from the effects of change. Take the global energy market, where breakthrough innovations continued to shake up the status quo. Or the corporate world, where a cyber security attack had international security and diplomacy ramifications. And what about that digital transport start up – barely four years old – challenging the entire global taxi industry’s business model and receiving an $18 billion valuation for its chutzpah..
2015
18th Annual global CEO survey
PWC