one of the interesting things about healthcaretoday is the data is becoming unsiloed and increasingly accessible. so for example, i'mwearing right now a little patch from a company called vital connect underneath my shirt.it's talking to my smartphone live. and i can look at a dashboard of my data from myfull on ekg, which will show up right here and it can track the trends and hopefullymy ekg looks like it's okay, if there are any cardiologist out there. i can also seedata about my steps, my stress level, my position. if i fall down and i don't get back up, thesystem can tell that. and this is really an intensive care unit like type level data inwhat will be less than five dollar a day disposable patch, which can be useful if you're trainingfor a marathon; if you're in a hospital and
you're not on a monitored bed; if your homewith a disease like heart failure. that's a lot of data. we need to learn to sift throughit and pull out the signals because no physician or nurse is going to want to be liable forwatching your life streaming ekg. but is an immense amount of power and data. and we'rein this era now of creating digital health exhaust, whether it's my smart watch, thispatch, my phone, it can tell a lot about me, my behaviors. if, for example, you have apatient who's got bipolar disorder, you can tell from their phone whether they're depressedor they're manic. that can play a role in smart disease, disease management. we cantake technologies like 3-d printing and tune home-based prosthetics. we can print prosthetichands for folks and legs in the developing
world. here's mini me in my pocket. it's a3-d printed version of me. that might be interesting if i need to make a prosthetic for someonewho has lost part of her face. or i was at mit media lab last week and met a young gradstudent who diagnosed his own brain cancer, written up in the new york times, and used3-d printing to print a version of his tumor. he said hey, you want a print of my braintumor? this helped his surgeons do a better job of finding it and removing it. and hewas proactive. he noticed some neurologic symptoms and pushed for his own repeat mrithat helped him get diagnosed earlier. i have in my pocket a new commercialized versionof a brain computer interface from a company called interaxon. this is the muse. you canwear this headset and kind of use this for
appified mindfulness and meditation. and imight use this to prescribe to a patient who has anxiety instead of giving them a drugi’d give them a headset. of course they could do meditation the old fashioned waybut this enables you to quantify it, have a bit of a feedback loop. so the ability tosort of quantify our own minds with brain computer interface like this can be used totreat everything from ptsd to adhd. we’re going to see use of video games to improvecognition or to treat disease. we’re seeing fancy brain computer interfaces from my almamater brown university to enable someone who’s quadriplegic just by thinking to move a roboticlimb. and those are getting smaller and more integrated. and so the disabled in the futuremay just think move my arm and it will be
rewired back to their own arm even if theyhad a spinal cord injury. so lots of ways to take, you know, sometimes consumer devices,crowdsource new apps and platforms on these that will change neuroscience, psychiatry.and when we can pull this data together we’ll become participatory in health care, we canmove to an era kind of like with google maps. you donate some data when you use google maps– your privacy, your speed and your location. but in exchange you can build a map of thestreets and of the traffic so you get some information back. i think we can have thatsame sensibility in health care whether it’s sharing your brainwaves, your genomics, yourwearable data while maintaining privacy and opt in abilities. you know using that informationcan give us better public health, you know,
early signals if it’s ebola coming or thecommon flu. or it can enable patient groups to crowdsource better cures for crohn’sdisease. for example there’s this new world of the microbiome. we have ten times morebacterial cells in and on our bodies than our own human cells. we’re learning thatthe microbiome plays a role in everything from obesity to inflammatory bowel diseaselike crohn’s disease. maybe even some psychiatric disorders. and we’re starting to be in thisera of fecal transplants. and you can imagine in five, ten years you’re going to get acocktail of a probiotic that’s going to reboot your gi system to help treat diseasesor prevent them. so, a lot of these tools are going to enable the clinician. you'regoing to be going to your corner pharmacy
in many cases to get medical care or telemedicine.it's going to enable you as an individual to own your own health information. there'salready thousands of apps out there, some are better than others but you can use thoseas tools to stay engaged in taking your vitamins and your aspirin or being on top of a muchmore complex regiment. and the challenge for all of us is to integrate these in the cultureof health and medicine. you can have the best technology, but unless your clinician usesit and gets paid for it in some cases, it
mit media lab 3d printing,may never be adopted. the payers of the worldneed to start looking at how some of these can provide better outcomes at lower costs.and even before they're fda approved, bringing these to market. and i think we're seeingmany smart pharma companies, payers, physician
groups think about how they layer these into be the disruptor and not the disruptee.
