Future of Medicine 2020
February 8, 2012 
4 Comments
As busy as I have been, I’m glad my COO made me attend the Future of Medicine conference at the Singularity Institute…while it is good to remain very focused as a sensory and motor neurorehabilitation company, sometimes it is good to zoom outand pay attention to larger trends. I thought I would post some notes from the conference speakers:
Ray Kurzweil gave his standard talk (beamed into a 3D hologram of himself) and then showed a set of graphs talking to the rate of change for IT related technologies. His thesis assumes that given enough activity in a research space loosely defined as information technology, the rate of change will be exponential, as opposed to linear. Check out his charts here:
http://www.singularity.com/charts/page82.html
He believes that biology has become an information technology…of course I share this view and built some projected neuroenhancement devices for the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
We spent most of the morning on personal genomics, which remain far behind in their promise to revolutionize healthcare. I did the MS in Computational Biology based on this hype, but agree with the sentiment that there is alot more work to be done to make personal genome sequencing actionable. To date, the best advice we can give is exercise, don’t be fat, don’t smoke, keep stress low and don’t do drugs/drink. Most genome maps would conclude the with the same treatment plan…I do think there will be some short term wins in this space as it relates to focused genomic mapping for drug dosing…of special note, I think the Warfarin dosing studies based on genomic analysis shows promise…not clear who will pay for the test though.
We spent the afternoon discussing aspects of EMR’s and mobile health…cardiologists are the farthest along in this space, but readily admit that more information isn’t necessarily helping them in making treatment decisions…this is also to say, we don’t know what to do with 24/7 data…since everything we do now is based on the office consult…this area will continue to develop as gamification (integrating games into a routine health check or patient lifestyles integration (EKG covers for iphones/seatbelts with defibrillators etc…)
Day 2 should be more interesting…however, after day 1 I still believe that neurostimulation will be the biggest “surprise” in the next 10 years…we will see if I change my tune after today.
