Healthcare technology trends

In an age when companies know the location and quantity of every widget in their inventory across the globe, and the onboard diagnostics of your car can be constantly monitored by a remote service, why does the medical professional not enjoy real-time insight into the condition of a patient under his or her care?


As a result, medical tradition has evolved around sporadic patient contact, with negative consequences both for early detection of health issues as well as patient compliance with prescribed treatment.

However, modern medicine need not face these limitations, provided that available digital technologies are now adopted. Longstanding hurdles to the development of a pervasive health monitoring infrastructure have been overcome by advances over the last decade in computing and communications.


The pieces are in place to provide continuous, remote patient management. We believe adoption of these commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies is overdue in healtcare, and will now occur with breathtaking speed. Consider the following:

• Computing power – Through the 1990s to today, the cost of processing power has become essentially insignificant, while the power that can be packed into an individual device has exploded. Desktop computers with sufficient processing power to perform predictive analytics like our SBM technology have been available for the better part of a decade. Today, there is enough processing power on a smart cell phone (Treo, Blackberry, Smartphone) to perform predictive analytics on the person carrying it.
• Pervasive networking – Massive investment in enterprise networks and the Internet over the last two decades have already made universal connectivity of desktop computers and servers a fact. Virtually all hospitals are already wired with a local area network, and most are undertaking hospital-wide wireless broadband upgrades. All modern bedside devices are easily networked so that data from the bedside can be sent to any destination computer on the hospital LAN, and therefore to any destination over the Internet as well. The "final mile" quandary of how to reach the homebound patient has been solved with the widespread availability of DSL and broadband home Internet connections. WiFi and BlueTooth enable measurement devices in the home to reach the Internet wirelessly, and in the last couple of years, broadband access over the cellular network through EDGE and Ev-DO now makes it possible to send large data streams from a person carrying a cell phone anywhere.
• Massive, cheap storage – Like computing power, the cost of storage has become trivial. Drives measured in the hundreds of gigabytes are cheaply available. Considering that a set of 10 sensor streams from one patient at a very high 5-second sampling frequency amounts to just 5MB of data per week, a $150 300GB drive can easily contain 60,000 patient-weeks of data. A 1GB SDMicro memory chip (the size of a fingernail) for a cell phone can store 3.5 years of such data for a single person.
• Improved sensor technology – In 2005, there were 250,000 implantable cardiac defibrillators surgically implanted worldwide. Makers of these devices are now including a variety of sensors on their devices, making them in situ real time sensors of critical indices like pressures, temperatures and heart rate. These sensors can’t be removed or interfered with by the patient, and provide reliable streams of data. Others are developing implantable passive sensors that require no power of their own, but are instead periodically powered through the skin by an external radio frequency source, which then also reads the sensor data and seamlessly transmits it to a remote data repository for review by a physician. Periodic readings (once or twice a day) from these sensors provide ample data streams for long-term health monitoring using our predictive analytics. Wearable sensors in the form of disposable patches like band-aids can now provide non-invasive vital sign and ECG measurements wirelessly (BlueTooth) to a nearby collection device such as a cell phone, with virtually no discomfort to the wearer.

With the power to gather so much data about the patient, there will come the need for level one filtering and exception flagging by intelligent automated software agents, to help direct the medical professional's attention where it's needed most. This is the focus of VG-BIO's technology development efforts, to provide the heathcare industry with the algorithmic tools to leverage increased patient monitoring capabilities for optimized patient care and physician practice.