We can see new technology being used to fight disease, develop new vaccines and medicines, and help people live healthier lives everywhere we look in the healthcare industry. Medtech Singapore based companies have spent the last two years focusing on using their expertise to solve the problems caused by the global pandemic. At the same time, many healthcare organisations that were not previously thought of as tech firms have turned their attention to technology and its potential to transform the delivery of their products and services.
The pandemic has clearly accelerated the digitization of the healthcare industry. Most healthcare providers plan to increase their investment in digital solutions following the medical technology trends. We will see continued growth in areas such as telemedicine, personalised medicine, genomics, and wearables, with organisers developing and delivering Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing, Extended Reality (XR), and the Internet of Things (IoT) benefiting services and treatment.
The percentage of health consultations conducted remotely increased from 0.1 percent to 43.5 percent during the first months of the pandemic. The reasons for this growth are obvious, but even if communicable diseases are excluded, there are compelling reasons to develop the ability to remotely test, diagnose, and treat patients. This trend has the potential to save lives by dramatically expanding access to medical treatment in remote areas and places where doctors are in short supply (such as China and India).
To accomplish this, new generation wearable technologies include heart rate, stress, and blood oxygen detectors, allowing healthcare professionals to accurately monitor vital signs in real time. The pandemic has also resulted in the establishment of "virtual hospital wards," in which centralised communication infrastructure is used to oversee the treatment of multiple patients, all of whom are treated in their own homes.
Extended reality (XR) is a term that encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). All of these involve lenses or headsets that alter our perception of the world, either completely immersing us in virtual environments (VR) or providing real-time images (AR/MR) of our surroundings. Virtual elements should be overlaid. They all have the potential to be game-changers in the healthcare industry.
VR headsets are used to train doctors and surgeons in the workings of the human body without putting patients at risk or requiring the supply of medical cadavers. VR is also used in the healing process. It could be used as part of therapy to teach children with autism social and coping skills. It is also used to facilitate cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help with chronic pain, anxiety, and even schizophrenia, where treatments that aim to help sufferers overcome their fears and psychosis have been developed to work in a safe and non-hazardous environment.
The high-level use of AI in healthcare, as in other fields, is to assist in making sense of the massive amount of unstructured data available for capture and analysis. In health care, this can take the form of medical image data such as X-rays, CT and MRI scans, as well as data from many other sources such as the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID, vaccine delivery, genomic data from living cells, and even handwritten doctors' notes.
Current medtech trends in healthcare surrounding the use of AI frequently involve the growth and upskilling of human workers. As previously mentioned, surgeons using AR are augmented with computer vision - cameras that can recognise what they are seeing and relay the information. Another critical application is automating initial patient contact and triage to free up physicians' time for more important tasks.
Preventive medicine is another area of healthcare that will be profoundly affected by AI in the coming years. Rather than treating disease after it has occurred, preventive medicine aims to predict where and when the disease will occur and address it before it occurs. Predicting where infectious disease outbreaks will occur, hospitalisation rates, and lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and the environment that are likely to cause health problems in different populations or geographic regions (for example, predicting opioid addiction a) the community, or which patients who self-harm are most likely to commit suicide.)
AI enables the development of tools that perform far more functions than traditional analytics processes. Spot patterns in large datasets, resulting in more accurate predictions and, ultimately, better patient outcomes.
In many industries, digital twins are becoming increasingly popular, as part of a trend that involves developing models informed by real-world data that can be used to simulate any system or process.
This trend in health care includes the concept of "virtual patients" - digital simulations of people used to test drugs and treatments, reducing the time it takes to get new drugs into general use from the design stage. It may begin with models or simulations of individual organs or systems. However, progress toward useful models that simulate the entire body is being made.
The digital twinning of human organs and systems is a near-term possibility, allowing doctors to diagnose various diseases and test treatments without endangering individual patients and reducing the need for costly human or animal tests.
Digital twin medical technology trend is regarded as one of the most important technological trends in healthcare for 2022 due to its ability to assist the healthcare industry in developing treatments more quickly and cost-effectively.
Drugs and treatments have traditionally been developed on a "one-size-fits-all" basis, with trials designed to optimise drugs for effectiveness in patients with the fewest number of adverse side effects. Modern technology, such as genomics, artificial intelligence, and digital twins, enables a more personalised approach, resulting in treatments that can be precisely tailored at the individual level.
Genomics, or the study of genes, and, more recently, the use of technology to map individual genomes (the DNA structure of an organism, such as an individual), is especially useful for developing personalised medicine. This is leading to the development of new treatments for serious diseases such as cancer, arthritis, and Alzheimer's disease. Nutrigenomics is a subfield of genomics that will see significant investment and progress by 2022, including the development of health-focused diet plans based on various genetic factors.
