Will robots routinely take cheek swabs sooner or later – and if so, how quickly will this occur?
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Hacking Humanity
Lara Lewington (W. H. Allen: UK, out there now US, 14 October)
Sensible bogs that observe your intestine well being. Robotic pets that enhance well-being. Mirrors that measure your blood strain. It’s exhausting to foretell the long run with any certainty, however, as a biomedical reporter, I used to be curious to learn a ebook that envisions how fast-evolving know-how may remodel healthcare.
In Hacking Humanity: How know-how can save your well being, and your life, Lara Lewington attracts on greater than a decade of expertise as a know-how reporter on the BBC to cowl a formidable array of improvements: from medical robots to lab-grown organs and genetic modifying to deal with sure circumstances. “Let me present you the way in which to a future the place we will be hacking humanity,” she writes within the introduction.
What follows is a whistle-stop tour by way of the most well liked developments in medical analysis, dropped at life by way of first-hand accounts of Lewington enthusiastically trialling cutting-edge units, being scanned and taking blood exams. She additionally meets the characters and corporations pioneering such improvements, serving to put a human face to instruments that always depend on synthetic intelligence.
However, as somebody who reads well being information every single day, I discovered the beginning of the ebook considerably underwhelming. Protecting wearable units that observe issues like your sleep, train and blood sugar ranges, Lewington explains what appears apparent to me: we are able to now monitor our our bodies like by no means earlier than and analysing this information may assist docs deal with us extra successfully. I might have preferred extra element on how wearables would possibly really be built-in at scale in under-resourced healthcare methods.
Subsequent sections have been extra attention-grabbing, reminiscent of a take a look at how improvements like 3D-printed organs are literally serving to scientists develop new medicines. I additionally loved a passage that covers blood exams and AI fashions which can be enabling earlier detection and extra personalised remedy of most cancers. In case you are much less acquainted with weight-loss medication and anti-ageing analysis, Lewington additionally supplies a fascinating rundown of each.
As a self-professed “tech optimist”, Lewington presents a really upbeat view of the units she encounters, usually reeling off a sequence of impressive-sounding research outcomes with comparatively restricted dialogue of any caveats.
Whereas this enthusiasm could also be refreshing for some, I’ve seen numerous supposedly “game-changing” applied sciences fail to ship – and would have most well-liked a heavier dose of scepticism.
The ebook does finish by acknowledging that the shiniest applied sciences are sometimes solely out there to the richest. Lewington additionally stresses the necessity for instruments to be examined on a extra various vary of individuals, together with ethnic minority teams and ladies, who are sometimes underrepresented in medical analysis.
Nonetheless, I might have preferred a extra in depth dialogue of how medical AI can worsen well being inequalities and the way we are able to keep away from this, given how closely this know-how options all through the ebook. Analysis has steered that some wearable heart-rate trackers may go much less nicely for individuals with darker pores and skin. It could have been good to have such circumstances woven between the promising outcomes, together with skilled opinion on how we are able to study from them.
General, Hacking Humanity could also be a very good choose for somebody who’s in search of a fast abstract of essentially the most formidable concepts on the forefront of medical innovation – however much less so for individuals who are in search of a deeper, extra important evaluation of the place healthcare is heading.
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