Your cell phone rings, and your brow furrows as you glance down at the caller ID.
Hello?
“Hello,” responds an automated voice. “There is a 97% likelihood that you will have a cardiac event within the next 12 hours. Please proceed to a hospital as soon as possible.”
According to experts like Eric Topol, director and chief academic officer at Scripps Translational Science Institute, technology like this — and a slew of other medical wonders — isn’t so far-fetched. In fact, some of it is already here.
There are now more cell phones in the world than there are toilets and toothbrushes, Topol said. And these phones, which have become our constant companions and virtual extensions of our bodies, are increasingly being used to track our physiology from moment to moment.
The intersection of technology, science, medicine and design has led to an explosion of apps for monitoring blood pressure, glucose levels and heart rate and measuring how well you sleep, whether you’re stressed or relaxed and whether you’re eating healthy. We have been able to harness the existing digital infrastructure to get personalized health data we did not have access to before.
Combine wireless sensors with the study of genes, or genomics, imaging and a proliferation of health-focused social networks, and you have a convergence capable of bringing about the “creative destruction” of medicine.
That’s the term Topol uses in his 2012 book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care,” to refer to the transformation that accompanies radical innovation.
This disruption, said Topol, will be characterized by the personalization of drugs, devices, screening tests and treatments.
Personalized medicine can deliver better information to help patients make an individual choice about the risks and rewards of a particular course of treatment: which medicines will work for him or her, which drugs may pose a danger and whether doses may need to be adjusted. Personalized medicine can also help profile someone’s potential risk for contracting a disease like cancer or diabetes.