In early
October, the University of Southern California's Center for Body Computing
hosted a conference to discuss the futuristic technologies that could work
their way into medicine and health care. During the event, they announced a new
type of health clinic, called the USC Virtual Care Clinic. There's a lot of
talk around virtual reality for gaming and entertainment, and even
communication. But the Center for Body Computing is betting that the new
consumer technologies of today--wearable sensors, VR, artificial
intelligence--will make for more accessible and more personalized health care
in the future.
Implantable
sensors could help doctors gather more data. And during the Body Computing
Conference this October, she introduced another intriguing technology, the
hologram house call. They screened a demonstration of this during the
conference, in which a hologram was beamed to a patient in Dubai to speak
"face-to-face" about potential diagnoses. This could bring doctors to
patients in areas that are far from research institutions, and allow physicians
to monitor patients over longer periods of time. Though there will still
obviously be procedures a hologram can't perform, like surgery.
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