10 Medical Technology Advances: Medicine In The Future

Mind-reading exoskeletons, digital tattoos, 3D printed drugs, RFID implants for recreational purposes: mindblowing innovations are coming to medicine and healthcare almost every single day. We shortlisted some of the greatest ideas and medical technology developments that could give us a glimpse into the future of medicine, there are so many that we had trouble fitting them into one article.

Here is a curated list of ten spectacular medical technology innovations, from augmented reality to artificial intelligence and tissue engineering. We think these trends will significantly influence how healthcare and medicine develop in the next decade.

1) Mixed reality opens new ways for medical education

Augmented, virtual, and mixed reality are all technologies opening new worlds for the human senses. While the difference between these technologies might seem arbitrary at first, it greatly determines how they could be used in healthcare. While AR lets users see the real world and projects digital information onto the existing environment, VR shuts out everything else completely and provides an entire simulation, and mixed reality is able to interact with the world while projecting information into it. Thus, AR can be used by surgeons for projecting potentially life-saving information into their eyesight during operations, VR can be used in psychiatry to treat phobias efficiently, and mixed reality can bring revolutionary novelties to medical education, or pre-operative surgical planning, among others.

For example, the Microsoft HoloLens opens up radically new ways for medical education as it can project the human body in its full size in front of med students. Thus, the organs, veins, or bones will be visible accurately in 3D, and future medical professionals will be able to analyse their shape and remember their characteristics more vividly than it is possible when studying from a book. There are already many universities that use these technologies:?Case Western opened its new health education campus in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic in 2019, or the NYU School of Medicine where students study anatomy from virtual reality rather than cadavers.

2) Brain-computer interfaces bring hope to the paralyzed

Research has geared up lately in the area of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). A few years ago Dr. Gary Marcus, at New York University and Dr. Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science told The Medical Futurist that brain implants are where laser eye surgery was decades ago, but the field will advance significantly in the upcoming years.

And they were right. In 2024, most of us have heard about brain-computer interface trials. Although Elon Musk's Neuralink got a louder media coverage, companies like Synchron are having more solid results. Their first procedure took place in 2019, which was followed by nine other patients so far. Their “stentrode” BCI is implanted via the jugular vein, through a minimally-invasive endovascular procedure, requiring no open brain surgery. After the tenth patient reaches the one-year postoperative mark, the company aims to get FDA approval for a 50-patient pivotal trial, the last planned landmark before commercial approval.

Meanwhile, according to publicly available information, the implant in Neuralink's first patient is "more or less very stable", and the company plans its second procedure. Given how results are published (or not published) on social media, it is more difficult to assess where they actually are.

Couple this technology with an exoskeleton, and magic will truly happen: as it made headlines when a 30-year-old paralyzed man, Thibault, was able to move all four of his limbs with the help of a 'mind-reading' exoskeleton. We expect more similar stories to come.

And this is still the beginning of the road. Imagine a retinal chip giving you perfect eyesight or the ability to see in the dark, a cochlear implant granting you perfect hearing, or a memory chip bestowing you with almost limitless memory. What if you could type into a computer with only your thoughts or control your entire smart house by sending out the necessary brainwaves?

Although that’s really galactic leaps away, various neuroprosthetics are already on the market: you can purchase cochlear implants and retinal implants, deep brain stimulation devices for people with Parkinson’s disease that send electrical pulses deep into the brain, activating some of the pathways involved in motor control, and a few more.

3) Might we all end up being recreational cyborgs?

There are already famous examples of real-life cyborgs, and I am truly convinced that such creatures will not only populate the terrain of sci-fi movies but will also be everywhere around us in the very near future. The ‘cyborg-craze’ will eventually start with a new generation of hipsters who implant devices and technologies in their bodies just to look cooler.

Advances in future medical technology will not just repair physical disadvantages such as impaired eyesight but will also create superhuman powers from having the eyesight of an eagle to possessing the hearing of a bat. Hearing aids powered with artificial intelligence, earbuds making you multilingual, or RFID chips already point to that direction. While a patient wearing implanted defibrillators or pacemakers can also be added to the group of cyborgs, I expect to see more cases when patients ask for the implantation of a certain device without having medical problems.

4) 3D printing drugs in dinosaur shapes for kids

If guns, bars of chocolate, and even entire houses can be 3D printed now, and the biotechnology industry is even working on printing out living cells; why would the appearance of 3D-printed drugs be surprising? It's a logical sequel that's already happening.

In August 2015, the?FDA approved?an epilepsy drug called Spritam made by 3D printers. It prints out the powdered drug layer by layer to make it dissolve faster than average pills. In June 2015, the UK’s?Daily Mail reported?that scientists from the University College of London are experimenting with 3D printing drugs in odd shapes; such as dinosaurs or octopuses in order to make it easier for kids to take pills. Those scientists, namely Professor Abdul Basit and Professor Simon Gaisford, saw a huge potential in 3D printing for medicine and pharma; thus they established FabRx in 2014. They told The Medical Futurist that they would be able to commercialize printed tablets within the next 5-10 years.?

Well, by now we certainly know the progress was slower than that, but the field of 3D-printed drugs is developing, and there are several approved drugs and ongoing trials. FabRx is currently?conducting the first pediatric clinical trial?of 3D-printed medicines in Europe, to explore the efficacy and customization of 3D-printed medications in real-world healthcare environments.?

While the technology is still nascent, the potential of 3D-printed drugs to transform the pharmaceutical landscape is undeniable. If pharmacies could print customized pills tailored to an individual’s specific needs, taking into account their age, weight, metabolism, and even genetic profile, this could revolutionize medication adherence and efficacy, as patients receive precisely the right dose in a form that’s easiest for them to take.

5) Gamification in health insurance is not a game

In November 2017,?Qualcomm and United Healthcare announced?that they had integrated Samsung and Garmin wearables into their national wellness program. It enables eligible plan participants to earn more than $1,000 per year by meeting daily walking goals. I believe this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship between health insurance companies, wearable manufacturers, and the principle of gamification. The latter indicates playful incentives, which could motivate and slightly nudge people into the desired behavior - such as a healthy way of life in the case of health insurance companies.

Another great example is MySugr, a diabetes management app, that has its monsters users may tame. "Living with diabetes and staying on top of your blood glucose can sometimes feel like trying to train a wild monster to behave." - the developers said about their thought process. "those of us living with diabetes know, it’s (...) a full-time job, where you’re working 24 hours a day without a break or any time off." Fredrik, one of the mySugr founders, went through a time when he struggled to manage his diabetes properly. So he decided to start improving his self-management behaviors by doing just one thing better each day - and it worked so well that their point-reward system was born. The app, originally the idea of two friends with diabetes, is used by millions of people today.

However, the question is how far health insurance companies should push such gamified solutions. Will they leverage data on accomplished or unaccomplished daily fitness goals to increase premiums for high-risk patients or to reduce their business risks by alerting patients about bad lifestyle choices? What will happen to patients’ private data??Should we prepare for Dr. Big Brother? How will the relationship between employers, employees, and health insurance companies change in light of easily obtainable personal fitness and health data? As more and more corporations offer health insurance packages with gamified tracking options to their employees, these ethical questions will become increasingly important, and we should offer fair and balanced responses - as soon as possible.

6) New technologies bring along new diseases?

Regarding technological development, there is always a risk for the emergence of so far unknown illnesses and conditions. New types of diseases might appear due to the excessive use of virtual reality solutions, video consoles or smartphones. Examples include virtual post-traumatic stress disorder (v-PTSD), which might be the diagnosis for gamers who participate in large virtual battles wearing VR masks (such as Call of Duty) and experience similar symptoms as those soldiers who fought in real wars.

Plus, video-game epilepsy, in fact, is well-documented and the subject of a trial that found that video games, in particular, were more likely to provoke seizures in subjects with photosensitive epilepsy than standard television programs, even if the same screen is used for both. Moreover, researchers also talk about Wii-related injuries lately, which stem from the name of Nintendo's wireless computer console, Wii, which brought along a more physically-oriented gaming experience. But our personal favorite is the so-called 'text neck', the term used to describe the?neck pain?and damage sustained from looking down at your cell phone, tablet, or other wireless devices too frequently and for too long. Expect to see ICD codes assigned to such new conditions soon.

7) Artificial food as the hope against food shortages

Synthetic tea? Lab-grown meat? Artificial milk? Nutrients and vitamins in a protein shake? Sci-fi movies like Matrix, Star Trek or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy showed us a glimpse of the future of eating disconnected from Mother Earth. Some innovative solutions are already here, promising an option for alleviating the overstraining of natural resources and still providing food for millions of humans.

For example, the Netherlands-based company,?Mosa Meat?introduced their first hamburger in London in 2013, and while it took much longer than their initially projected 3-4 years, now they have applied for regulatory approval to launch their product in Singapore.

But artificial meat is just the tip of the 21st-century iceberg. London-based Hoxton Farms creates a cultivated alternative for pork fat, by growing pig stem cells inside large bioreactors. Portugues Cell4Food develops a product replacing chopped octopus, Onego Bio in Finland is producing ovalbumin, the main protein in egg white, inside fungal cells, and their US partner Perfect Day manufactures whey with precision fermentation.

French Standing Ovation produces caseins, the main proteins in milk with precision fermentation, to create high-quality, animal-free cheese alternatives - which, let's be honest, would be a game-changer for the vegan community.

8) Voice as a diagnostic and medical support tool

Researchers and medical professionals have noticed in the last years how useful voice-based solutions can prove to be in healthcare - both in diagnostics as well as in supporting their daily tasks, such as administration.

Scientists found that characteristics of patients' voices – or as medicine labels them, vocal biomarkers – reveal a lot about their health; and help in detecting serious diseases and health risks. For example, Vocalis Health?worked with Mayo Clinic, and developed voice-based tools for patient health monitoring, screening and detection; their first study was to identify vocal biomarkers to detect pulmonary hypertension. Sadly, the company seems to have gone out of business since then.

Another initiative, Sonde Health Inc., a Boston-based company develops a voice-based?technology platform for monitoring and diagnosing mental and physical medical conditions, but we expect a lot more solutions to come in the future.?

Cough analysis is an especially interesting segment. Specialized hardware and artificial intelligence-based software can provide more details into one’s coughing habit for self-evaluation as well as clinical assessments. Currently, available apps such as?CoughTracker and CoughPro identify and record coughs from the user, analyze them through AI models, and provide contextual summaries.?Other similar AI-powered cough-tracking apps are being developed by?Swasaa?and?Raisonance.

9) Patient empowerment and patient design

In the last decade, rapid technological advancement has resulted in a shift toward digital health in medicine. This shift is theorized as a cultural transformation of how disruptive medical technologies providing digital and objective data accessible to both caregivers and patients lead to an equal level partnership between physicians and patients with shared decision-making and the democratization of care.?

Patient centricity is slowly replaced by patient design, a new era, where healthcare is not designed with "patients in mind", but with patients as team members.

From the patients' side, the result is the evolution of the 'e-patient' - where the 'e' stands for ‘electronic’, ‘equipped’, ‘enabled’, ‘empowered’, ‘engaged’ or ‘expert’. A patient who takes responsibility for their health, and actively engages in shaping their future - in a mutually beneficial partnership with their caregivers. Although this doesn't sound like technological advancement, which it really isn't, it is enabled and facilitated by wearables, health sensors, and any other innovations which make patients the point of care. And from this viewpoint, it is unmissable from this list.

10) Digital tattoos for a more invisible healthcare

With the development in 3D printing as well as circuit printing technologies, flexible electronics and materials, applying so-called digital tattoos or electronic tattoos on the skin for some days or even weeks became possible. Some researchers use gold nanorods, others graphene or various polymers with rubber backing to apply the tattoo on the skin without causing irritation.?Certain experts believe?that these skin patches or tattoos are only the beginning, and in the future, other skin techniques such as henna, tanning, and makeup will also be tested.

These flexible, waterproof materials impervious to stretching and twisting coupled with tiny electrodes can record and transmit information about the wearer to smartphones or other connected devices. They could allow healthcare experts to monitor and diagnose critical health conditions such as heart arrhythmia, heart activities of premature babies, sleep disorders and brain activities noninvasively. Moreover, by tracking vital signs 24 hours a day, without the need for a charger, it is especially suited for following patients with high risks of stroke, for example. Although we are not there yet, there are certain promising solutions on the market - for instance,?MC10's (now Medidata) BioStampRC Sensor was a fascinating early example, sad that it has disappeared.