Emerging technologies have revolutionized the healthcare sector. Innovations and recombinant innovations in health and sector have bridged the demand and supply gap for healthcare services and has innumerable impacts on drug research, surgeries, biomedical data extraction and analysis. Most importantly, these technologies have affected how healthcare app developers are building consumer-side applications.
1. Machine learning
Machine learning has a wide scope and when applied to healthcare sector, it has pushed certain medical actions and took them to their peaks. Take examples of image recognition and natural language processing, two important functions of machine learning. Both of these functions are must-haves for telemedicine applications, automated dermatology assessments, and computerized diagnostics.
When used with assessment applications, machine learning can help identify and diagnose symptoms, can talk about the seriousness of the issue, give out medical prescriptions and most importantly, notify the user if urgent visit to doctor is required. Such applications have largely helped with dermatology assessments and dental care.
The vast combinations of machine learning algorithms with big biomedical data and Internet of Things have helped automate several medical procedures. It has made possible robotic surgeries and accelerated the treatment protocols. In fact, with machine learning experimentation, drug research and discovery has also become quicker.
Advanced chatbots work on machine and deep learning algorithms and empower automated chatbots that are used for telemedicine, mental health awareness and patient attendance. All in all, machine learning has made diagnosis of heart diseases more accurate than ever and reduced time required for clinical decision making, especially when diagnosing sensitive diseases like cancer and radiotherapy planning.
2. Telehealth and Telemedicine
Telehealth is the most important and successful use case of technologies in the healthcare sector. Mobile applications on this telehealth niche accelerate the diagnosis process and patients with low-urgency symptoms or conditions don’t have to physically visit the doctor. This sheds the load on clinics and hospitals and reduces burden from doctors and other medical staff. These applications have also contributed during the pandemic when patients of acute and chronic diseases would work around online appointments and medical consultancies as they weren’t up for moving out.
3. Robotics
The biggest applications of robotics and healthcare are found in dental care and surgeries. Massive amounts of surgery data are fed into systems and then robots are made to perform traditional actions upon them. This way, some hospitals have been able to automate knee replacement surgeries. We are now expecting more and more child deliveries and C-sections performed by robots.
These automated surgeries have the potential to drastically improve the provision of emergency care and decrease the mortality ratio of children and women.
4. Wearables
Wearable devices include smart watches and fitness bands with sensors. These smart watches have special applications that pair different smart devices like cell phones and home automation systems. These wearable devices track physical activity, movements, steps taken, distance climbed, calories burned, blood pressure, sleep time, heart rate, workout routes and so on.
Applications that work with smart watches have some special features like Bluetooth accessibility, GPS location tracking, customized push notifications, wear OS optimized User Interface and User Experience, data security and privacy and dark mode. In additions, these applications have to be platform independent and support multiple operating systems.
With these smart watches and wearable apps, it has become easier to provide instant care responses for sensitive diseases like Epilepsy and Diabetes. There is a smart watch called Embrace that notifies caregivers when an epilepsy patient is about to have a seizure or faint. Also, these watches have made disease management easier because of personalized recommendations and real-time records of body conditions.
5. Cloud computing
Cloud computing has its biggest applications in data management and remote accessibility. In the healthcare sector, cloud-based applications can help with patient history and electronic health records (EHRs and EMRs). With cloud-based services used in abundance, patients don’t have to carry on-paper records. This has substantially saved treatment times and accelerated emergency care responses. Also, patients moving overseas can continue with healthcare provision because of history available online.
Considering the availability of cloud-based portals and data, the storage costs for hospitals have drastically dropped. In case they want to collaborate with research institutions and understand the patterns of genetic diseases, their cloud applications can have massive amounts of data for analysis.
With cloud computing, concerns like data retention, privacy and security can also be prioritized. A typical healthcare mobile app development company also ensures that with cloud, hospital staff has the authority to only allow limited access to patients’ data.
6. Big Biomedical Data
Big Data combined with machine learning algorithms can help with pharmaceutical research and development as well as empower effective therapeutics. The way big data works is a promise of a new healthcare era. It guarantees value-based care because diseases that were untreatable for centuries can be studied, and their patterns can be identified across macro-families.
While it is also workable on its own, big biomedical data has promising effects when combined with machine learning, telemedicine, chatbots, wearables and robotics. It is helping with preventive medications, alternate prescriptions, cost reductions associated with doctors’ appointments and diagnostics. Google’s medical APIs can diagnose the existence of cancer cells better than 6 doctors and that too with least time. If this is not the revolution in healthcare – what else is?
Conclusion
Applications of innovative technologies in the healthcare sector has improved medical supply-chain, increased patient engagement, reduced workload on doctors, nurses and other medical staff, augment treatments for cancers and heart diseases and accelerated effective risk and disease management. All of these direct medical functions help healthcare organizations optimize ER admissions, push learning and development, decrease mortality rate, allows for smart staffing and strategic planning.
These technologies are still evolving and this is only the tip of the surface. All of these wearables, big data, robotics, cloud and artificial intelligence and futuristics and will transform the healthcare industry in ways that we can only visualize in this decade. The future of medical is different, but significantly promising for patients as well as medical professionals.
