Digital health

Digital sciences for healthcare

Digital health involves the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) products, services and processes combined with organisational changes in healthcare. It aims at improving the health of citizens, the efficiency and productivity in healthcare delivery.

Digital health encompasses a wide range of fields including computer sciences, healthcare, engineering, electronics, social sciences, artificial intelligence, public health, health economics and management.

Indeed, digital health is such a disruptive evolution of healthcare that its development will call for profound thinking about its impact on ethics and society.

A.I., artificial intelligence, characterises any device or software that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.

What do digital sciences bring to healthcare?

 

Digital health recently became a great field of interest for public and private investment in healthcare. The use of data generated by medical devices is hoped to improve healthcare outcomes for patients and make health systems much more efficient. New systems and products will allow to analyse data from very diverse types and sources, in huge quantity from the patient level until the population level.

 

Indeed, healthcare is evolving thanks to the progresses of machine-learning and artificial intelligence, coupled with the big data gathered by from genomics and proteomics. It makes medicine more preventive, personalised, precise and patient tailored.

 

This breakthrough digitization of healthcare may already be exemplified by the results of super-computers from IBM or Google which are able to diagnose efficiently complex pathologies, like rare cancer cases, with more accuracy than physicians, thanks to the ability of A.I. to compare clinical data of the patient with a huge clinical database.

 

A.I. are also incorporated in new smart medical devices, that can have multiple benefits: restoring human functions with smart implants, from cochlear implant to restore audition to artificial retina or artificial pancreas. Wearable devices can also be used for diagnosis and monitoring at the point of care and at the point of need, such as glucose monitoring coupled to micropump for instance.

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More disease prevention, prediction, instead of symptom treatments

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Drastically improved diagnosis for complex pathologies

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More personalised approaches to cure diseases

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Patient empowerment

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Acceleration of research, prevention and diagnosis thanks to big data studies

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Automation of hospitals: better diagnosis, treatment and facility management

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Improved access to healthcare in remote places

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Shifts healthcare from hospital to home to improve the quality of life

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More time for healthcare professional for important tasks (instead of routine / automatable tasks)

Some examples of digital health application

Smart medical devices

These medical devices come with software that enhances their capacity to treat, transfer, receive and/or use data collected directly in-situ. They are connected and as such, able can adapt their action to the information and/or instruction they receive. It gives access to energy monitoring, recognition of patterns, connectivity, advanced human-machine-interfaces and increase their safety and security.

An example of smart medical devices:

The “Artificial pancreas”, an hybrid closed-loop system developed by the French company Diabeloop to monitor and treat diabetes, connects a continuous glucose monitor, a patch insulin pump and a cell-phone application connected to an A.I. This A.I. analyses data in real time and takes into account the patient’s physiology, history and data entries (like meals or exercise) to determine the correct dose of insulin to administer. In has been approved in Europe in November 2018

Smart medical devices

These medical devices come with software that enhances their capacity to treat, transfer, receive and/or use data collected directly in-situ. They are connected and as such, able can adapt their action to the information and/or instruction they receive. It gives access to energy monitoring, recognition of patterns, connectivity, advanced human-machine-interfaces and increase their safety and security.

An example of smart medical devices:

A remote cardiac monitoring program that uses a recording device and machine-learned algorithms to produce reports on cardiac arrhythmias for clinician review. It is developed by the company iRhythm, the leadless patch is attached to the chest for up to 14 days, rather than the typical 24-hour observation period, which may help detect a greater number of arrhythmias. It has been approved in Europe in November 2018

Mobile health (mHealth) is aiminaiming to adapt existing or to create new software solutions to be applied in healthcare

Typical examples of mHealth innovations are : well-being apps, telemedicine, electronic health records, online search engine for symptoms, interconnection of healthcare services, data fusion and deep learning.

For instance, medical chatbot applications like the app developed by Ada Health increase access to health-related information by making them available and understandable for anyone with a smartphone. In exchange, it builds large health databases which can support clinical decision making and enables providers to optimise and personalise healthcare.

The global digital health market

2017

US$73,1

billion

%

Annual growth rate

2023

US$223

billion

How will NOBEL support the digital health community?

  • The NOBEL Horizon 2020 Research European project is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) aiming to help the convergence of digital health with other key-enabling technologies with application in healthcare: nanomedicine, photonics, robotics and advanced materials. NOBEL is coordinated by the ETP-Nanomedicine.

 

  • European Technological Platforms (ETPs) represent each individual technological community at an European level and help bridging those community with the European Commission. Six ETPs that have applications in healthcare are NOBEL Associated Partners: ETP-Nanomedicine, Photonics21, EU-Robotics, EU-MAT, the European Society of Biomaterials and ETP on Smart Systems (EPoSS). The NOBEL Project provide them with a meeting space and dissemination by organising annual meetings of their representatives and sharing information from each of them to the HealthTech community.

 

  • The NOBEL Project roadmaps future of HealthTech in Europe by combining the inputs of all its ETP Associate Partners in a single vision: the Continuum of Care, a vision for the future of healthcare in Europe.

 

  • NOBEL participates to the digitisation of healthcare:

       – Digital tools and the concept of digital twin are central in the Continuum of Care, NOBEL’s vision for the future of healthcare in Europe

       – The organisation of a brokerage by IA development and education companies in front of MedTechs by NOBEL will push actors to cooperate

NOBEL Booth at MedTech Forum 2018

14th May 2018, Brussels

First annual meeting of the European Technological Platforms (ETPs) representatives

5th June 2018, Paris

TAB Greet & Meet at MedFIT 2018

25th June 2018, Strasbourg

Third NOBEL Consortium meeting

4th October 2018, Milan

Introducing NOBEL's vision for the future of HealthTech during INDTECH 2018

30th October 2018, Vienna

All terms are defined in the Glossary