Future of Health Care and Medical Technology

Conference in Seoul, South Korea - Futurist conference speaker Patrick Dixon: Over 1 billion people will be over the age of 65 by 2025. 65% of all health spending is on those over the age of 65, most of whom have several chronic conditions, almost all related to the ageing process. Life expectancy will increase very rapidly in almost every nation. In the last hour, it is likely that your own life expectancy has increased by an average of 15 minutes. The greatest health challenges in the next two decades will be: Brain damage – eg Alzheimers; Cancers; Obesity including diabetes; Heart Disease and strokes; Chronic wounds and Bacterial Infections; Parasitic Infections including Malaria; Infertility; Care of older people (mainly at home); and (big risk) threats from Viral Pandemics like Sars, Bird Flu or Ebola. Medical technology will transform future health care: examples include next-generation 3D imaging inside the body; 3D printing of new organs and organ repair using stem cells; endoscopy using tiny tubes for diagnosis and surgery - $75bn a year market by 2022; computer-aided diagnosis – using Big Data; digitised patient records – instant availability in the Cloud; telemonitoring, and home diagnostics – huge growth in virtual medicine; Growth of self-learning – web-based diagnostic programmes for worried people; social media – sharing health experience – scoring carers, rating doctors and hospitals; We will be able to read your genetic code in less than 2 hours for less than $5000 by 2025, enabling us to predict with far greater accuracy your medical future – using Big Data, Cloud Computing, combining tens of thousands of genomes, medical records, lifestyle data. Expect to hear a lot more about the use of nanotech machines in medicine – they already exist in nature as viruses, and manufactured viruses will be widely used to treat diseases such as cancer. Expect many medical technology startups, some of which will become global giants, and for major investment in medical technology here in South Korea, encouraged by government policy. For more - videos, articles and keynotes on medical technology and health - see .