The best way to predict the future is to invent it and the future so invented is feared by the very person who invented it! The reasons given by Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of artificial intelligence, for leaving the technology giant Google appear similar. He says it is scary to think of what an unbridled AI can do to humanity. Well, I suppose it includes healthcare.
Much of the future of healthcare technology will be AI-driven and some of it is already here. AI and machine learning are deployed in several of the medical gadgets and instruments that are in use at present. Internet of Medical Things is doing wonders in its application in remote patient monitoring and wearable devices such as continuous automated blood sugar-level monitors and insulin infusion pumps, which deliver timely doses of insulin to diabetic patients and are referred to as artificial pancreas.
At the given pace of technology advancement, it is exciting and if I share Mr. Hinton’s sentiment, scary too to envision what the future holds for patients and doctors alike.
I have taken the time machine to the future on a fast-forward journey (not very far, according to Mr. Hinton)
So welcome to the futuristic hospital! I am ushered in to the outpatient wing by a friendly robot (not yet a killer robot), trained to fold its hand and greet me with an anglicised vanakkam. It wraps a band across my wrist, a smart chip which captures all of my personal data (of course, Aadhaar-linked), including my DNA print (after fingerprint and iris scan).
Next I enter an array of modular consultation suites. The suites are expansive and cold, brightly lit wide corridors with polished floors and gleaming desks. There are huge LED screens flashing on the walls and all other paraphernalia one sees in sets of any Hollywood sci-fi movie.
Sleek user display terminals adorn every desk. Behind the desks are the doctor robots and robotic nurses with a humanoid appearance. Vocoders sound effects of robotic speech fills the air. There are paramedic robots drawing blood for testing with painless laser guns!
Everything seems so surreal around me.
A robotic nurse with a plastic smile on her face appears, greets and checks my vitals on the remote monitor and scans me head-to-foot on an AR (augmented reality) programmed system and let me go with a thank you in a deep bass voice.
I am shown my way to the waiting hall for the senior expert to see me and diagnose my ailments.
The waiting area looks like the interior of an aircraft — only that the plush high back chairs are arranged in a wide circle and I am instructed to wear a seat belt. The chair slowly rotates a full 360 degrees as it revolves slowly to enable me to see the happenings around. On one corner of this big space, there is a giant display screen where medical students are taught clinical medicine in virtual reality.
The counters at the end I guess are pharmacies where again robots dispense medicine ordered on computer-generated prescription.
The familiar “double helix” DNA print of the patient appears on the corner of the prescription for “personalised medicine” (pharmacogenomics). The tablets dispensed for paediatric patients are designed like miniatures of cartoon characters — there are Walt Disney’s Mickey and Donald Duck and our own Chota Bheem. There are metallic parts of skull, bones and joints. It dawned on me that 3D bioprinting can design drugs, stents and grafts of desirable quality shapes and sizes.
In the waiting hall, there are patients of all age and genders, but this time, they are real and alive in flesh and blood.
As I keep waiting, I engage myself in conversation with an elderly gentleman. He apparently is waiting for a review after undergoing robotic surgery where in through a keyhole opening on his chest, a completely clogged blood vessel in his heart was replaced a week ago with an “electronic blood vessel”. A tiny camera-laden robotic device went into ultra narrow blood tubes (endovascular ultrasound), took pictures, cleared the clog and replaced the blood tube.
There is an octogenarian who was earlier crippled by Alzheimer’s but was implanted with a brain chip which enables him to process his memory for recent and past events effortlessly. It was amazing to note that the hospital offers cyborg services (cybernetic organisms) which can repair, replace or augment lost functions of the human body. So people who suffer brain attacks and lose power of limbs and cognitive ability can get back to near normalcy with implants which use a brain computer interface.
In extreme instances of augmentation, these can even create mini-superhumans out of ordinary men and women, whether pertaining to physical, mental or sensory functions.
Thus one can acquire the pace and agility of a sprinter like Usain Bolt or the speed and decisive mental prowess of a chess grandmaster. Any other skill sets that one wants to acquire can be ordered, designed and fitted.
At last, I am seen by the human doctor with natural intelligence but on a virtual screen. He mechanically takes down the history, runs the vitals and checks me up again by remote monitors. All the data along with the AR-computed images are fed into the computer algorithms and on the screen, flashes the diagnosis which blinks every now and then like how breaking news appears on TV channels. Again algorithms come up, but this time for treatment. The doctor says a curt thank you and disappears from the screen.
My smartphone beeps, and the prescription comes on my mobile screen. I am reminded of the payment towards consultation and diagnostic services, needless to say it is a mindboggling amount and with one swipe of a card, I pay and walk out.
As I come out of the time machine, I am reminded of our neighbourhood GP, his befriending smile and warm reassuring touch and words when ever I visited him in his decrepit clinic . I resolved to be more courteous and thankful to him in future!
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