Predictive Healthcare - A bet for the next decade

Healthcare is a preventive measure

Over the last century, we have been investing an enormous amount of resources in developing cures for diseases such as cancer and flu. Many of the deadly diseases are curable these days, but at tremendously high cost. In the next few decades, would such preventive healthcare approach meet the drastically growing demand?

Seeing the growth of aging population, a huge surge of need is expected from patients waiting to receive a physical and mental diagnosis. Meanwhile, with a declining workforce, including doctor, nurse and researcher, any increase in medical resources following the same rule would seem difficult.

Predictive healthcare

Like predicting the spread of diseases, Google had attempted to estimate trends of flu and Dengue based on search patterns, alerting the society for preventive vaccination programs. A similar strategy can be deployed more holistically into the healthcare industry, with a set of anonymous health data collected from 24 x 7 sensors.

Sensors are everywhere these days. Smartphones keep track of your connectivity with your friends and family, as well as the change in your living and working environment, which detect potential causes of stress and mental illness.

Health monitoring sensors collect data such as body temperature, blood pressure, blood glucose, heart rate, sleep pattern and activity level and provide early warning for stroke and acute heart diseases.

Combining personal health record, demographics with environmental variables such as temperature and humidity, providing a full picture of health performance over time for doctors to understand real causes behind health issues, avoiding misdiagnosis and unnecessary medication.

Healthiness becomes a new competition

Just like a smartphone jogging application, your health condition could constantly match against other healthy individuals within your community over time. You can understand how well you are doing and receive personalized recommendations on what better can be done.

So, next time when your neighbor asks how well you are doing, you may launch your mobile app and tell her your result.