Daniel Kraft Discusses the Future of Medicine

Today’s post highlights a fascinating TED Talk given by Daniel Kraft, titled “Medicine’s Future? There’s an App for That.” Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist with over 20 years of experience in the medical industry. He currently serves as the curator of Singularity University’s FutureMed, a program that explores developing technologies in biomedicine.

As we discussed in a previous post, many medical diagnostic tools no longer require large, expensive equipment and highly trained operators. Today you can test for cataracts, receive a vision prescription, and measure your glucose levels, heart rate, or lung capacity all on your smartphone. Experts predict that within the next year there will be very few routine activities your physician can’t do on a handheld device.

Kraft believes that breakthroughs in healthcare will occur exponentially in the near future, resulting in drastic advances in digital medicine, robotic surgery, nanomedicine, genomics, neuroscience, and connected healthcare via social networking. In the eye care industry, Kraft discusses the development of artificial retinas to give sight to the blind as well as augmented reality through electronic contact lenses.

New medical technologies are emerging at a rapid rate, but developing these technologies is only part of the equation. Moving forward, scientists and medical professionals will face the challenge of integrating these technologies into existing healthcare systems and implement them into cloud-based medical networks.