Over the past decade, human health has changed beyond recognition. Improvements in health care, more effective drugs and treatment methods have helped significantly increase life expectancy and reduce child mortality. However, the world has recently faced a new problem - the aging of the population, which requires more and more resources of the health care system every year. According to representatives of the international technology company Huawei, the best way to deal with this challenge is to focus on disease prevention and personalized treatment with the help of the latest technologies.
New challenges
According to the 2021 statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO), the average life expectancy on the planet has increased from 66.8 to 73.3 years in the last two decades, and statistical models predict that in 2030 it will increase by 16.5 percent. The population will already be older than 60 years of age. It is estimated that the health care system will no longer be able to meet the needs of such a rapidly aging population in that year, because at that time there will be 5.7 million nurses and 18 million other health care system workers in the world, not to mention financial and material medical resources.
"In order to explore how technology could help solve the future crisis of the healthcare system, in the Smart World 2030 report we looked at it in 3 directions: the possibility of using computing technology to detect future diseases, the use of precision medicine and the cloud to make health services independent of a specific location." - says Mindaugas Plukys, head of corporate communication in Lithuania at Huawei Technologies.
The goal is not to treat, but to prevent the disease
According to WHO data, 60 percent diseases are determined by lifestyle factors, and nowadays 7 out of 10 people die from non-communicable diseases - all this shows that in the future we should focus on prevention rather than treatment. Real-time monitoring of various physical indicators and modeling of the obtained data could achieve this goal.
Huawei's report mentions that in 2030, devices with smart biosensors will become very popular, which will record various data of our body every second. This information will be processed using big data technology and combined with laboratory test data, medical diagnoses and treatment results for that person. Based on this, special knowledge schedules will be created, which will indicate specific measures for each person to take care of their health independently, thus reducing dependence on doctors.
In addition, these graphs of knowledge about a person's health will be able to be combined with graphs of medical knowledge, which will help determine the risk of developing certain diseases, predict the state of a person's health in the future, and obtain more accurate information about the symptoms, risk factors and effects of medications felt by a person. This will allow doctors to make a diagnosis much faster and more accurately and prevent the disease from beginning.
The treatment is individually selected for everyone
Unfortunately, no matter how much the prevention of various diseases improves in the future, it is likely that certain diseases cannot be completely avoided. However, specialists reassure that their outcome after ten years should be much better, as it will be possible to individualize the treatment of each patient with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), adaptive radiation therapy, rehabilitation robots and many other modern tools.
For example, AI can help doctors create an individual treatment plan for a patient by analyzing the medical histories and treatment results of thousands of individuals with a similar pathology, selecting the most effective treatment strategy from them. Also, this treatment plan will be able to be adjusted in real-time as the patient's condition worsens or improves by presenting the AI and allowing him to make new treatment decisions based on new information.
"AI-curated treatment is likely to be one of the biggest changes in medicine in the next decade, but to realize its full potential, hospitals and other healthcare facilities will need to acquire the ability to store and process massive amounts of data." In order to make the transition to AI medicine as smooth as possible for these critical institutions, the Huawei Cloud division has been developing a special cloud solution for biomedicine for some time. It should provide all the necessary digital tools and capabilities necessary to give every patient access to personalized treatment based on big data analysis," reveals Mindaugas Plukys.
On the other hand, in the future, artificial intelligence will be used not only for the selection of treatment, but also for the improvement of individual treatment methods. A good example of this is adaptive radiation therapy (PST) for cancer. Unlike traditional radiation therapy, which, due to its poor targeting, also removes a lot of healthy surrounding tissue along with cancer cells, PST, with the help of AI, will be able to automatically identify changes in the affected area of the body and more accurately select radiation targets. This will help to focus the rays only on cancer cells and avoid complications caused by radiation damage to healthy tissues.
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