SingularityU: Future medicine will be personalised and high-tech

Medicine will become personalised and high-tech in a few years, a conference on the future and exponential growth was told on Wednesday. 

The first prescribable app has been approved by the American Food and Drug Administration, Dr Michael Gillam told the SingularityU NZ Summit in Christchurch. It's for type 2 diabetes.

Soon every human condition and procedure will have its own app, he said. They will measure, sample, remind, warn, alert and share.The apps will reside on a device – perhaps a mobile phone – and patients will breathe into them or provide tissue samples. Other apps will sense 24/7.

Hardware and software will be built into previously mute things. ​Chairs will measure posture, plates and glasses will track calories, sugar and fats, diapers will analyse urine for disease, cribs will monitor breathing and heartbeats, mirrors might detect depression, toothbrushes will diagnose diseases such as bronchitis and lung cancer, contact lenses will measure the sugar content of tears and alert diabetics of trouble. 

People with allergies will be able to scan food for, say, peanuts, before eating. 

Gillam, a medical doctor and medical informaticist, was until recently director of the Microsoft Healthcare Innovation Lab and chair of informatics at two American emergency medicine organisations. He was speaking on the final day of a Singularity University conference that brought many Silicon Valley experts to Christchurch to talk about exponential growth and the future.

The rise of smart watches means some people are familiar with wearables but we'll soon get implantables and ingestables.

The rise of personal medicine will see the right medicines, delivered to the right people in the right dose at the right time, he said. Artificial intelligence will detect tumours and problems in scans with far great accuracy and speed than humans. 

There will be downsides. Devices that can detect your own emotional status will also detect the emotions of others. We could witness the "end of emotional privacy", Gillam warned.

Some argue that infidelity and other types of lying will become impossible because untruthfulness will soon be detectable by artificial intelligence, he said. But maybe not reliably in the early stages.

Perhaps the biggest shift will come in the developing world, Gillam said. It's estimated 2 billion people there never see a doctor in their lives. Yet 1b already have mobile phones and the most of the rest will have them fairly soon. They too will get access to health apps and technologies.

Doctors might need facilities similar to air traffic control towers. They'll monitor populations as health information streams into the cloud.

Super cheap solar power will mean there's plentiful energy to run desalination plants. Fresh, clean water will be available to almost all and deserts will be greened, providing fresh nutrition to millions living marginal lives. 

Gillam called the coming changes a "Copernican shift", after the 16th century astronomer  who theorised that Earth was not the centre of the universe – or even the solar system. That idea kick-started the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.