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While working on developing sensors
to measure stress, Rosalind Picard and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) made a startling discovery. They found that when monitoring
skin for electrical changes activated deep in the brain, the signals proved
effective at detecting potentially fatal seizures.
The findings open the door to
wearable monitoring devices that, among other things, could reduce deaths among
people with epilepsy. “Wearables are
going to be much bigger than anyone imagined,” says Prof Picard, founder and
director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab.
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From implantable devices that
monitor medical conditions to the progress being made towards the 3D printing
of organs, the rate at which new technologies are emerging in healthcare seems
to be growing rapidly.
This does not come out of nowhere,
notes Caroline Corner, managing director of the healthcare equity research team
at financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald. “A lot of rapid advances right
now are built on the shoulders of other advances,” she says.
She cites the example of 3D printing
of human cells, pointing to the possibility of creating human organs. While
this remains some way off, groups of cells can be printed for use, for example,
in toxicology studies.
“There’s a lot of attention on 3D
printing of cellular matrices now but that’s built on years and years of cell
research,” says Ms Corner. “We’re starting to get positive steps in the right
direction.”
The ability to “grow” living cells
and tissues in a laboratory has existed for some time, says Nizar Zein, chief
of hepatology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “However, 3D printing
potentially allows for these cells to be organised geographically in a 3D space
simulating human organs,” he adds.
As biotechnology and digital
technology come together in healthcare, another factor is playing a role in the
advance of medical technologies — miniaturisation and Moore’s Law, namely the
observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors
that fit on a chip has approximately doubled every two years.
“You have a massive increase in the
capacity to communicate, to analyse data and to provide individuals with
supercomputers right in their pockets,” says Olivier Leclerc, digital head of
the global pharmaceutical and medical products practice at consultants
McKinsey. “Miniaturisation has been playing out for a while but it’s now
starting to make an impact.”
Miniaturisation has been playing out
for a while but it’s now starting to make an impact
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Miniaturisation will enable the
development of wearable and implantable biological devices that, equipped with
sensors, can wirelessly transmit a constant stream of data about medical
conditions.
Analysts say this will lead to a
rapid increase in the development of technically advanced wearable devices.
Transparency Market Research predicts that the global wearable sensor market
could expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 45 per cent between
2014 and 2020.
Prof Picard believes that the
advances these technologies facilitate in healthcare will — over a far shorter
space of time — be similar to those seen in weather forecasting in the past 150
years, with meteorologists now able to predict events such as tsunamis and
hurricanes.
“That happened by having lots of
sensors in lots of places and people sharing information, getting a lot of data
over time and figuring out which patterns predicted which outcomes,” she says.
Similarly, the combination of
wearable sensors, that provide a continuous flow of data, with the analysis
made possible by machine learning and pattern recognition, will help foresee
the pattern of medical conditions. Physicians will be able not only to make
better decisions about what interventions are needed, but also create
treatments tailored to individual patients.
This is very different from the
traditional mode of care, in which information about a patient’s condition
exists on paper or digital medical records that are essentially a series of
snapshots taken during periodic visits to the doctor.
Mr Leclerc cites the example of
progressive neurological diseases. “Seeing a physician a few times a year is
not enough because you may have declined so fast that they can’t do much for
you,” he says. More consistent monitoring, on the other hand, “can allow you to
modify your treatment over time and intervene at critical moments, and
hopefully slow down the decline”.
Prof Picard believes that what she
calls “affective wearables” — which would generate social and emotional data as
well as data on sleep patterns and physical activity — could potentially
prevent the onset of conditions such as depression.
“People don’t just wake up depressed.
In most cases, it’s a gradual change in the things we’re doing to ourselves.”
she says.
“If we can learn those patterns, then just as we
can forecast a big storm coming, we can put you on a path towards a likely
diagnosis.” 
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