Technology in Medicine - Emerging Trends

One of the paradoxes of increasingly powerful computer-based technologies is the declining cost and a hold out in hopes of reducing healthcare costs in future. An example of a up and coming developing new technology is the Smart Intensive Care Unit .

In an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) , heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow and other measurements are carried out routinely. The analysis of these parameters is quite time consuming for the puposes of analysis and continuing therapy. In an ICU setting, there could be wide variations of the patient's vital signs and it is critical for the nurse or doctor to be alerted quickly for deterioration of the patient's condition.

The relatively new introduction is the " Smart ICU" which contains a neural network operating on " fuzzy logic" - in simple terms this is a method to represent mathematically vague and imprecise human measures such as " almost", " very" and " quite far away" which cannot traditionally be designed in digital systems, which operate on "on-off" conditions.

It will be a major challenge for healthcare providers to keep abreast of these emerging new technologies and methods, training in their use, and budgeting for their acquisition.