The staid world of diagnostic testing is about to undergo a major disruption with huge advances in sensors and sensing technologies that live in or on our bodies, within our homes and offices, and even within our computers and networks.
Today we’re witnessing a massive shift in who will collect and control diagnostic and other health information. For the first time, as people and patients, we will have control over what we measure, when we measure it, and who has access to our personal data. This is made possible by a new generation of revolutionary biosensors that contain the power of clinical lab instruments in packages that are light, small, wireless and highly efficient.
This is a new world of sensors: they can be body-attached, monitor our immediate personal environment, or even work as pure software apps that extrapolate data from our health records. Using simple, non-invasive methods to take samples of tiny amounts of blood, traces of skin tissue, breath droplets or an image of the inner eye are just some of the new methods emerging. It is exciting to consider that several of these multifunctional sensors, working in concert with powerful mobile handhelds, offer us extraordinary data collection and diagnostic tool sets that will put us in touch with our health in ways never imagined before.
These advances in health sensing, available any time and anywhere, are game changing. A continuous stream of personalized health data will transform how doctors interact with their patients to address and solve health challenges. More importantly, it puts patients at the center of the care process. Personalized data means that specific therapies or drugs will be more effectively delivered and controlled, allowing doctors to fine-tune treatments and watch incremental physiological changes as they occur.
This technology will also disrupt the clinical diagnostics business by moving testing from specialized (and expensive) labs to pharmacies and then ultimately to our homes.
