Devices to help you sleep, robotic boots and other technologies that will change your health

Doctors and researchers at Google, MIT and more forecast advances they see coming for health and wellness.

Dr Justin Bourke at Melbourne’s BioFabrication 3D Centre, where they hope to replace damaged body parts using robotics. Picture: Alex Coppel.

Here is a look ahead at some of the most promising potential advances, including wearable devices to improve quality of life, new applications of artificial intelligence, and expanding options for medical treatment at home.

Do-it-yourself ultrasounds

In the future, ultrasound imaging could be done from home as easily as we deposit a cheque from a mobile phone, says Eric Topol, a cardiologist and founder and director of California’s Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Probes linked to a phone or other device will allow patients to take an ultrasound image themselves, Topol predicts. That could let patients share results directly with their medical practitioners from wherever they are, without having to travel to a hospital.

AI will help ensure accuracy, Topol says. “For the heart, which is the most difficult ultrasound – echocardiogram – you can have someone with no training (do it),” he says. “As long as you put the probe on the left side of the chest, the AI will tell you to move it up or down, clockwise, counterclockwise, and automatically capture the video images.”

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California San Diego have also been developing different ultrasound technologies that use patches to capture ultrasound imaging over a period of time, not just in distinct snapshots, Topol says. “It’s pretty exciting because then you could get like a week’s worth of continuous imaging. This isn’t just lying in a bed. You want to see how an organ is working under real-life circumstances.” Currently, the patches need to be linked up to computers with wires, but researchers envision devices that will be used at home.

A blood substitute

Transporting blood from a donation site to where it is needed on the battlefield isn’t easy, says Kerri Dugan, director of the Biological Technologies Office at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the US Department of Defence. It’s challenging to access a constant supply and keep the blood refrigerated as it travels.

“What if, instead, you had a dehydrated powder, that when you add water to it, it provides all the qualities that you need from whole blood in an emergency situation?” says Dugan, who has a doctoral degree in molecular biology.

A Ukrainian paramedic helps a wounded soldier during a medical evacuation in February. Picture: Getty Images

A few months ago, she and her team embarked on a four-year program to research and develop a substitute for blood that can be shelf-stable and made at scale.

They were thinking of battlefield situations, but a blood substitute could eventually be used in civilian settings as well. In recent years blood supplies have been dangerously low as the pandemic shut down donation sites. Successful development of a blood substitute could decrease dependence on donations.

One of the challenges is that the substitute has to have three crucial characteristics of blood to be viable: It needs to raise blood pressure, deliver oxygen and have the ability to stop bleeding, but there’s no blood substitute that can do all this yet.

The doctor in your pocket

The smartphone could become the central device for most health and wellness needs, says Karen DeSalvo, chief health officer at Google.

“Sometimes in medicine, we want to add things on, like, what’s the new thing? … but this is already in people’s pockets. If it’s already part of your life, how do we enable it so that it’s helping your health, which is a critical part of life?” says DeSalvo.

Among her team’s efforts at Google is an AI system that has been trained on large language models – the type of technology that drives ChatGPT – to provide answers to medical questions, as a possible building block for future healthcare applications.

Greater reliance on phones could bring far-reaching positive changes, DeSalvo says. During the pandemic the way patients relate to their medical information and seek care have started to shift that power dynamic.

“What we started to see during the pandemic was this explosion of consumers saying ‘you’re going to open the door and share my mammogram results with me’ – but what if I could actually have the mammogram, have the image? What if I could get a second read on that because I had an app on my phone that would allow that to happen?” she says.

Getting doctors to trust data patients may provide on their phones could be a challenge, she says. Patients may also have privacy concerns.

A robotic boot

“People have been dreaming about robots they could wear on their bodies since the advent of machines,” says Steve Collins, associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Biomechatronics Laboratory at Stanford University.

“It’s only been in the last decade, actually, that we’ve had any exoskeletons or prosthetic limbs that demonstrably improve any aspect of human performance. But we have hit that tipping point recently,” says Collins, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering. “The near future looks really exciting.”

He’s been developing a wearable robotic boot that gives the user a personalised “push” to help them walk with less effort. The device could allow older people experiencing a decline in mobility to continue to live at home, and enjoy socialising in the ways they’re used to. Going up stairs or crossing the street quickly could become easier.

A donor at a mobile blood bank.

People might not want to wear a device that signals their age, he says. But perceptions are changing. “The culture seems to be really shifting around these technologies, maybe through popular media sci-fi. People find this hi-tech stuff kind of cool,” he says.

The boot is being tested in laboratory trials, as his team figures out how to improve balance and potentially reduce joint pain. In the future it could either become a consumer device people pay for over the counter at their local pharmacy, or an approved medical device that could be covered under insurance.

Computer-aided diagnosis

Artificial intelligence is likely to have a growing role in interpreting our medical tests and scans, says Atul Gawande, assistant administrator for global health at America’s Agency for International Development.

“We have proof that double readings of mammograms are able to be more accurate and have more sensitive detection of cancers – fewer misses – but it is challenging and expensive to have two different readings,” says Gawande, who is a surgeon and writer. If an AI tool was able to provide an initial screening to accompany an expert radiologist read, the double reading could become a more commonplace and accurate method for doing mammograms, he says.

Gawande and his team are already using computer-aided detection to combat tuberculosis in countries across the world, from Nigeria to Vietnam, using a portable X-ray system in a backpack that is able to provide a reading of the X-ray it produces. In the future we could see more applications of this computer-aided detection across various different diseases, and it will be more common for AI to support doctors making diagnoses.

On-the-spot treatments

Devices that provide on-the-spot treatments for health issues, similar to an insulin pump for diabetes, are on the horizon, says Pattie Maes, professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

Her team has been at work designing wearable devices that use electronic and audio stimulation to help people fall asleep and get better rest. One device simulates the sensation of rocking to help people fall asleep.

“If a system tells you night after night that your sleep score is low, it actually isn’t very helpful, because it makes you more anxious about the fact that you’re not sleeping well. It could potentially make your sleep worse,” Maes says. “I think just measuring all this data and then giving it to people isn’t enough. It’s important to also think about interventions.”

Such devices for immediate treatments could be developed to treat various ailments, she says. They could measure data on your physical and mental health, and help you live at your optimal level.

Maes sees treatment for anxiety as a theoretical application. “Maybe they will have a device that based on their physiological readings tells (people) – or may not even tell them – that they are getting anxious, but that somehow stimulates them to breathe in a different way or (do) something to be able to deal with that anxiety moment better, ” she says.

This doesn’t mean we won’t need doctors any more, she says. “I think that doctors will be involved in maybe prescribing these types of digital solutions.”

The Wall Street Journal