There’s much to learn about future digital trends from an analysis of what’s happening in South Korea. For this, the Korea Communications Report provides fascinating reading. For example, the bar charts on page 56 (yes it is worth scrolling that far) demonstrate the huge surge in video usage towards hte end of last year as 4G became established. As Prof Mike Short (for whom I am grateful for this and other pointers in this post) commented “It may prompt some ideas about Broadband and higher speed Mobile could help in Healthcare – eg the Dr will see you now”.
Another really interesting resource is the EU’s Digital Agenda Scoreboard 2015: Strengthening the European Digital Economy and Society which enables you to explore all sorts of statistics about European life, and then visualise it in a variety of different ways. It will be a real help for those ‘scene setter’ slides at the start of a presentation. Highly recommended.
Another interesting pointer was the FT which had a major supplement on digital health during London Technology Week, coming out on the second day of the Kings Fund event. “Digital health looks like an idea whose time has come.” is indeed most propititious coming from such a respected journal.
We don’t often hear from Buckinghamshire New University’s Centre of Excellence for Telehealth and Assisted Living (CETAL) so it’s great that Firas Sirhan, Director of CETAL, has kindly provided this brochure describing the facility.
When mobile health is completely sorted, Dr Eric Topol’s ‘doctorless patients’ are receiving automated continuous care and only being flagged up to clinicians when there are exceptional circumstances requiring human medical intervention, we’ll all want to go to the Science Museum’s great Information Age Gallery to see how bad it all was before information, like electricity and many other services before it, passed from exciting novelty to boring necessity. As it happens this gallery has just been selected as one of the finalists to win Best Heritage Project in the National Lottery Awards. To win, and secure more funding, they need your support – please vote for them here before midnight on 29th July. Then future generations will look at current telehealth kit much like this editor’s children look at the slide rules and typewriters in the museum and laugh!
(on the topic of ‘doctorless patients’ Prof Mike Short ponders the concept of “healthy cars” – perhaps ones that do not need the full weight of the Medical Devices Directive, however ones that could offer safer driving with sensors for driver improvement. A form of Assisted living but applied to the Domain of the car – but perhaps for the elderly or infirm: a natural step towards autonomy and an interim measure before we have full driverless cars.)
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