- A Future Take on the Doctor’s House Call
Cut your finger off with a knife in the kitchen?
By the time an ambulance arrives, you get to the hospital, get looked at, fixed, and complete all the paperwork; it’s a long time between the accident and going home.
But what if you had a surgeon at hand, at home? With the accuracy of a surgeon but better because human error is taken out of the equation. We’re talking a robotic doctor in your home.
You could simply sit down with your now removed finger and let the robotic device do its work. Scan your injury, apply a local anaesthetic, assess the damage and then go about repairing it.
Reconnect the blood vessels, fuse the bone together, stitch up the skin, disinfect the wound and bandage it up for you. This is about the capability of a ‘hospital in your home’.
Robots are already used in surgeries. They’re more efficient and significantly more accurate than humans. Like many technologies, the bigger picture is to enable them at a consumer level.
Your own home could provide you with the medical assistance needed. Cutting out delays, ambulance response times, tired doctors, busy emergency departments and infection riddled hospitals, having capability at home for minor accidents and operations will become a normal practice before you know it.
- Penthouse Suite at the Orbital Hotel and a Day Trip to the Moon
Space is no longer the final frontier. The solar system, the universe, it’s all up for grabs in exploration. Soon a team of eight will be sent on a one way mission to Mars.
By the end of this year we’ll have space tourists by the rocket-load entering the boundary of space. There are at least four different space tourism companies willing and almost able to send ordinary (though very well cashed up) people into space.
But instead of just going to space and 25 minutes later landing back down on earth, what about going up into space and docking with your hotel for a space stay of a week or two? Or taking a side trip to the moon in a reusable and self-launching rocket?
Bigelow Aerospace is investing $500 million into private space stations to create somewhere you can go to experience the joys of zero gravity in your own luxury villa.
And with companies like SpaceX developing reusable multiple launching rockets like the Grasshopper, we’re not too far away from the time when you’ll be able to take a Virgin Galactic shuttle to the Bigelow Space Hotel and a SpaceX trip to the moon for a look around.
- Forget Angry Birds, This App Could be a Life Saver
It’s genuinely the stuff of Star Trek.
Recall Mr Spock holding a small device to the body of an injured Starfleet person, to then announce all injuries and ailments with amazing accuracy? This is reality now. One device to diagnose serious injury or illness.
The FDA is already in the process of approving at least two different personal devices to monitor your health and diagnose you with precise medical accuracy.
Just hold the device to your head; it will check your heart rate, temperature, blood oxygenation. You can do a urine analysis if need be, a blood check, a breath analysis. All in a device no bigger than your phone. In fact, it’s an accessory to your smartphone, because the associated app helps in the diagnosis of your illness.
Whether you’re sick, your child is sick, it doesn’t matter. The medical tricorder is something that everyone will carry around. You’ll be able to monitor your own health on a daily basis with unprecedented accuracy. You’ll know you’re getting sick well before you feel the symptoms.
A $10 million incentive from Qualcomm is helping get the tricorder to final production, and it’s safe to say within the next 12 months there will be a fully commercialised tricorder available. One simple piece of technology to help keep you fitter, healthier and safer.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this take on the future over the past few days. Put simply, the future is something you should look forward to, not dread. Because the technological progress you’ve seen in recent years is just the beginning of what we believe could be one of the biggest lifestyle advances in human history.
If you’ve got your own view of what the future could look like, and the technology we’ll use, why not drop a line to [email protected] and type ‘My Revolutionary vision for the future‘ in the subject line.
Sam Volkering.
Editor, Money Morning
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From the Archives…
Keep One Eye on Resource Stocks and the Other on the NASDAQ
31-05-2013 – Kris Sayce
Getting in on the ’99 Cent Craze’ with Crowdfunding
30-05-2013 – Sam Volkering
Buyer Beware: Japanese Government Bonds are Moving
29-05-2013 – Murray Dawes
The Best Contrarian Play on Gold I’ve Ever Seen…
28-05-2013 – Dr Alex Cowie
A Revolution in the Share Market is Coming…
27-05-2013 – Kris Sayce
