Conference Presentation, Panel
Big Data, Small Devices: How Technology Is Advancing Public Health
- Global internet-connected devices are projected to reach approximately seven per person by 2020.
- About 25% of the world's population will likely undergo genomic sequencing by 2025, with specific nation targets including 100,000 genomes for England and Saudi Arabia, and roughly one million for China and the U.S., potentially scaling to hundreds of thousands globally.
- Global cancer cases are expected to rise from 14.5 million to approximately 22 million, representing a 40% increase over the next 15 years.
- The translation of NIH research into practice is anticipated to decrease from 17 years to 17 seconds via cognitive systems, which can match patients to 190,000 clinical trials in seconds.
- Cognitive systems like Watson are forecast to influence every health or healthcare decision over the next 200 years, including a potential future where student versions replace cell phones for children.
- Wearable-integrated vital signs and social engineering driven by big data are expected to drive increased socialization and physical activity, potentially reducing future cancer treatment needs and enabling accountability for primary prevention.
- Healthcare monitoring is predicted to shift from quarterly check-ins to proactive alerts triggered by data flags for declining steps or sleep, with tools potentially correlating diverse data streams such as spending and reservations.
- UC intends to return data to its 14.1 million patients, while cost reductions for the U.S. inpatient care sector (approximately $1 trillion annually) may be achieved through the creation of a master spending list.
- A 60% reduction in A1C and a 40% reduction in BMI were observed in the University of Indiana's Fitbit employee program, serving as a baseline for anticipated outcomes.
- The public health sector will likely undergo complete transformation through the convergence of genome data, wearables, and computational analytics, contingent upon obtaining patient permission for data integration.