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The past decade was about the rise of digital health technology and patient empowerment. The next decade will be about artificial intelligence, the use of health sensors and the so-called Internet of Healthy Things and how it could improve millions of lives.

The cultural transformation of health care we call digital health has been changing the hierarchy in care into an equal-level partnership between patients and physicians as 21st century technologies have started breaking down the ivory tower of medicine. But these milestones are nothing compared with what is about to become reality.

With advancements in exoskeleton technology, AIs ever-increasing importance in health care, and technologies like 5G and quantum computing soon going mainstream, theres much to be excited about.

Here are the five biggest themes for health and medicine for the next 10 years.

Artificial intelligence in medicine

Developments in artificial intelligence will dominate the next decade. Machine learning is a method for creating artificial narrow intelligence narrow refers to doing one task extremely well and a field of computer science that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed, building on top of computational statistics and data mining. The field has different types: it could be supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised or reinforcement learning, among others. It has an unprecedented potential to transform health-care processes and medical tasks in the future and it has already started its invisible revolution.

If we consider how AlphaGo, the AI developed by Googles DeepMind lab, beat world champion Lee Sedol at the classic Chinese game Go by coming up with inventive moves that took experts by surprise, we can get a glimpse at what AI can hold for health care. Such moves were made possible by the combination of neural networks and reinforcement learning that this AI uses. This enabled the software to operate without the restrictions of human cognitive limitations, devise its own strategy and output decisions that baffled experts.

We can expect to see the same surprises in medical settings. Imagine new drugs designed by such algorithms; high-level analysis of tens of millions of studies for a diagnosis; or drug combinations nobody has thought of before. When applied to medicine, an algorithm trained via reinforcement learning could discover treatments and cures for conditions when human medical professionals could not. Cracking the reasoning behind such unconventional and novel approaches will herald the true era of art in medicine.

In global health, for example, an algorithm can provide a reliable map of future measles outbreak hot spots. It uses statistics on measles vaccination rates and disease outbreaks from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as non-traditional health data, including social media and a huge range of medical records. Thats just one example, but the field is already buzzing with smart algorithms that can facilitate the search for new drug targets; improve the speed of clinical trials or spot tumors on computed tomography (CT) scans.

However, while experts believe that AI will not replace medical professionals, it also seems true that medical professionals who use AI will replace those who dont.

A myriad of health sensors

Medical technology went through an amazing development in the 2010s, and theres now no single square centimeter of the human body without quantifiable data. For example, AliveCors Kardia and Apple Watch measure electrocardiogram and detect atrial fibrillation with high sensitivity. The EKO Core digital stethoscope records heart and lung sounds as a digital stethoscope, while blood pressure is monitored with the Omron Blood Pressure Smartwatch, the MOCAcare pocket sensor, and blood pressure cuff, the iHealth Clear, the Skeeper, a pocket cardiologist, or the Withings Blood Pressure Monitor, and of course, dozens of traditional blood pressure cuffs.

There are dozens of health trackers for respiration, sleep, and, of course, movement. And while researchers cant decipher your dreams yet they are working on it, alongside figuring out all kinds of brain activity. For example, through EEG. Thats a method that records electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached externally to the scalp. The NeuroSky biosensor and the Muse headband use it to understand the mind better and in the latter case allow for more effective meditation. As you see, theres not much left unmeasured in your body and it will even intensify in the future. For example, we expect digital tattoos to become commercially available within five years, which will not only measure the majority of the above-mentioned vital signs, but they will do so continuously. These tiny sensors will notify us when something is about to go wrong and we will need medical advice or intervention.

Moreover, with developments in 3-D printing as well as circuit-printing technologies, flexible electronics and materials, applying so-called digital tattoos or electronic tattoos on the skin for some days or even weeks became possible.

Made of flexible, waterproof materials impervious to stretching and twisting coupled with tiny electrodes, digital tattoos are able to record and transmit information about the wearer to smartphones or other connected devices. While these are only in use in research projects, they could allow health-care experts to monitor and diagnose critical health conditions such as heart arrhythmia, heart activities of premature babies, sleep disorders and brain activities noninvasively. Moreover, by tracking vital signs 24 hours a day, without the need for a charger, it is especially suited for following patients with high risk of stroke, for example. Although we are not there yet, there are certain promising solutions on the market such as MC10s BioStampRC Sensor.

Quantum computing puts medical decision-making on a new level

In 2019, Google claimed quantum supremacy and made the cover of Nature magazine. One example of how this technology will have a major impact on the health-care sector is quantum computing taking medical decision-making to a whole new level and even augmenting it with special skills. What if such computers could offer perfect decision support for doctors? They could skim through all the studies at once, they could find correlations and causations that the human eye would never find, and they might stumble upon diagnoses or treatment options that doctors could have never figured out by themselves.

At the very endpoint of this development, quantum computers could create an elevated version of PubMed, where information would reside in the system but not in the traditional written form it would reside in qubits of data as no one except the computer would read the studies anymore.

In addition, the applications of quantum computing to health care are manifold, ranging from much faster drug design to quicker and cheaper DNA sequencing and analysis to reinforced security over personal medical data. While the technology does hold such promises, we still have to be patient before practical solutions can be implemented in medicine. However, with continued progress in this area, even though quantum computing has been something from a science fiction novel, this decade will see the first such computer used in the clinical practice too.

Chatbots as the first line of care

Symptom checkers that function on the same principle as chatbots are already available, free of charge. However, these rely on the user inputting symptoms and complaints manually. We yearn for one that can make predictions and suggestions based on a users data, like sleep tracking, heart rate and activity collected via wearables. With such features, those bots can help users make healthier choices without having to drag themselves to their doctor.

There was a Black Mirror episode titled Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too that featured an incredibly smart and emotional chatbot that had human-like conversations with the character. Think about having a similar personalized chatbot thats accessible via your smart device and with additional health and lifestyle features. This chatty virtual being can wake you up at the appropriate time based on your sleep pattern and advise you to take your antihistamines as the pollen concentration is particularly high during your commute that day, before you even get out of bed. It can even recommend what you should consume for each meal based on your nutrigenomic profile. It could find the best words for you to motivate you to go to the gym. It could find the best jokes that help you get into a good mood. But would you rather bend to the rules of an AI, essentially forgoing your freedom of choice, than experience life based more on your own will?

5G serving the whole ecosystem of digital health

5G networks will enable data to be downloaded at more than 1 gigabit per second, allowing for downloads 10 to 100 times faster than the currently available 4G services. 4G networks can only serve around a thousand devices within a square kilometer, while 5G can serve a million. It will make the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) possible by connecting a huge amount of health trackers with laptops, smartphones and many more digital devices. There will be no connection issues or latency, as the trackers will be able to work in harmony while getting the most out of our data.

Such a boost will allow for more reliable communication, which is a must in areas like telesurgery, remote consultation and remote monitoring. With bigger bandwidth and faster connection, there might be a boost in wearables as health IoT networks become more stable and reliable, and further help with patient engagement in relation to their health.

Major applications of 5G are expected to be apparent starting in 2021.

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, Ph.D., is The Medical Futurist and director of The Medical Futurist Institute, analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a Ph.D. in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top-100 author.

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The top 5 technologies that will change health care over the next decade - MarketWatch

To reliably use quantum computing devices, researchers need to have precise knowledge about an electrons quantum mechanical properties. However, there is a considerable amount of uncertainty inherent in measuring quantum states. This is especially impactful on researchers who are attempting to measure the starting conditions of a quantum computing experiment, where an accurate assessment of the quantum state is essential for downstream success of an experiment.

New research from Penns Quantum Engineering Laboratory describes a system that can reset and validate a quantum experiments starting conditions. Led by engineer Lee Bassett, this new initialization procedure will save researchers the time and effort of rerunning experiments while also enabling new kinds of measurements that require a knowledge of a quantum states exact starting condition. Lab members David Hopper, Joseph Lauigan, and Tzu-Yung Huang conducted the study, which was recently published in Physical Review Applied.

Initialization is one of the key, fundamental requirements for doing almost any kind of quantum-information processing, Bassett says. You need to be able to deterministically set your quantum state before you can do anything useful with it, but the dirty little secret is that, in almost all quantum architectures, that initialization is not perfect.

Read more at Penn Engineering.

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Engineers ensure quantum experiments get off to the right start - Penn: Office of University Communications

WASHINGTON, February 21, 2020 - U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios expressed confidence in the supremacy of the U.S.s artificial intelligence and quantum computing programs over Chinas, in a talk at the Hudson Institute on Thursday.

United States research on AI and quantum computing features the most highly cited papers, most investment by the private sector, and greatest government funding, he said.

This assertion challenges the Made in China 2025 Initiative, a 10-year plan that China issued in 2015, and which outlined 10 key tech industries in which China hopes to become a world leader.

Recent progress by the Chinese government in the field of high-speed fiber-optic broadband, AI and surveillance have fueled some analysts fears that the Chinese will hit their targets.

Kratsios laid out four key components of a winning tech strategy in which the U.S. excels: Leadership development, a low-regulatory environment, a belief in the power of the citizen workforce, and international engagement with allies.

Kratsios referenced two specific examples to bolster his argument. He mentioned how Trump committed to at least $200 million for STEM education last year, and how American corporations more than matched that figure by donating $300 million.He also recounted the story that he said put America at the head of the pack in the quantum supremacy race. The story bears upon the uniting of resources invested by the U.S. government in the Quantum Lab at UC Santa Barbara with Googles subsequent acquisition of the lab and connection of that research team to its treasure trove of resources.

Its not a James Bond/Jason Bourne crossover, but the concept of quantum supremacy is vital for national security, Kratsios said. America has only achieved it through a free market of ideas involving prudent government investing and private sector intervention.

Governmental funding and R&D are unique in that they fill the gaps that the private sector doesnt focus on.

Kratsios elaborated that the government tends to invest in early-stage, pre-competitive R&D which it expects the private sector to nurture and raise into a mature industry, such as in the case of the UCSB Quantum Lab.

Kratsios alsomade some comments on the proposals that the EU released Wednesday regarding AI and data. He characterized their approach to AI as values-based, and worried that they do not prioritize implementation.

Kratsios also found fault with the documents binary approach to classifying AI as high risk or not high risk, saying the report clumsily attempts to bucket AI-powered technology into two camps when there should be more spectrum and flexibility in the model.

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U.S. Progress on AI and Quantum Computing Will Best China, Says CTO Michael Kratsios - BroadbandBreakfast.com

No U.S. strategy to respond to competition fromChina will succeed unless it includes increased investment in research, a concerted effort to attract more students to key research fields, and a more creative approach to turning ideas into commercial products, MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in congressional testimony on Wednesday, Feb. 26.

Reif spoke at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee on U.S.-China Trade and Competition.

Whatever else the U.S. does to counter the challenges posed by China, we must increase our investment in research in key technology areas, and we must enhance our capacity to get the most out of that investment, he told the panel. U.S. strategy is unlikely to succeed if it is merely defensive; to stay ahead, the U.S. needs to do more to capitalize on our own strengths.

Reifs Capitol Hill appearance came immediately after he delivered an opening talk at a National Academy of Sciences (NAS)_event commemorating the 75th anniversary of Science, The Endless Frontier, a 1945 report to U.S. President Harry S. Truman that is seen as the founding document of the post-World War II research system in the U.S. The report was written by the late Vannevar Bush, who had a long career at MIT, including service as the Institutes vice president and dean of engineering.

At both the NAS and on Capitol Hill, Reif called for a visible, focused, and sustained federal program that would increase funding for research and target the increase at key technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced communications.

The U.S. lacks an effective, coordinated way to target research toward specific areas and funding has fallen far behind whats needed to stay ahead of our competitors, Reif told Congress. One promising proposal is to create a new directorate at the National Science Foundation with that mission, and giving that new unit the authority to be run more like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Reif also said that attracting top talent is another essential element of a successful strategy. At the university level, that requires two parallel tasks attracting top U.S. students to key fields, and attracting and retaining the best researchers from around the world, he said.

Specifically, he called for new programs to offer federal support to undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs who are willing to study in fields related to key technologies. He also said foreign students who receive a U.S. doctorate should immediately be given a green card to settle in the U.S., and he warned against anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Finally, Reif said the U.S. needs to experiment with ways to speed the transition of ideas from lab to market. He called for new ways to de-risk technologies and to create more patient capital, and suggested that the Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax policy, should look at tax policies to create incentives for longer-term investment and to foster more university-industry cooperation.

The U.S. edge in science and technology has been a foundation for U.S. security, prosperity, and quality of life, Reif said, in conclusion. But that edge has to be regularly honed; it is not ours by right or by nature. We can best sharpen it with a strategy founded on confidence in ourselves, not fear of others.

Two weeks ago, Vice President for Research Maria Zuber delivered a similar message to Congress, in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on how to improve the intelligence services access to science and technology.

Zuber said that to help the intelligence services, the U.S. needs to capitalize on its strengths, which she said include world-class universities, an open research system, and the ability to attract and retain top talent from around the world.

Like Reif, Zuber highlighted a proposal to create a new technology directorate at the National Science Foundation, as well as the need to attract talent domestically and from abroad. She also cited MITs AI Accelerator a cooperative project between MIT and the U.S. Air Force as the kind of cooperative work that the intelligence services could foster.

In her testimony, Zuber emphasized the need to maintain an open U.S. research system: The U.S. faces new challenges and competitors, she said, but we are well-placed to succeed if we get the most from our unrivaled strengths.

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President Reif testifies before Congress on U.S. competitiveness - MIT News

People want to kill Waldemar Zurek. They shout epithets at him on the street. News sites call him a traitor, thief and disgrace to his country. His crime, as he put it recently stepping out of a courtroom where he faced anti-government charges, is at once simple and dangerous:

Doing my job.

Zurek is among hundreds of judges who have marched against the harassment, discipline and dismissals theyve encountered for criticizing Polands increasingly zealous nationalist government. They range from local judges to the Supreme Court president. Judges from 22 European countries joined them on the streets of Warsaw last month to oppose changes they said would erode the independence of Polands courts.

In the four years since the right-wing Law and Justice party was elected to power, this nation that was once hailed as a post-Soviet success story has become the object of scorn among human rights groups. Legislators have imposed restrictions on news outlets, clamped down on museums, called for the closing of its borders to Muslim refugees and railed against gay rights as a foreign threat to Polish identity.

The judges find themselves at the center of a battle over the nations and, to a wider extent, Europes democratic ideals in a time of resurgent populism and xenophobia.

I dont recognize my country, said Zurek.

He was born in 1970 in Chrzanow, about 20 miles southeast of Katowice, to anti-communist activists. As a teenager, he spray-painted walls in his hometown with slogans against the government and state media Down with communism, Solidarity and TV news is lying and protested with revolutionary groups under threat of arrest. But Zurek is facing a different, more troubling, enemy today.

Hes changed phone numbers to avoid anonymous text messages that call him a communist pig who should be sent to camps in North Korea. At one point, he stopped going to the market with his family after receiving emails promising two shots to his face when he was out with his wife and two young girls.

Demonstrators carry a large national flag during a protest against the governments court overhaul in front of the Polish Parliament in Warsaw.

(Wojtek Radwanski / AFP/Getty Images)

Over the years, the Law and Justice party has appointed its allies to a constitutional tribunal, taken over the body that selects new judges and attempted to purge the Supreme Court. This month, the government clashed with European Union officials after the Polish president signed a law prohibiting judges from questioning changes to the judicial system.

The party has dispatched state TV and commercials to depict judges as elite and out of touch. A prime-time TV show that debuted this year, The Caste, features stories of corrupt judges, while billboards describe them as thieves and violent drunkards. At least $2 million has been spent on the campaign, according to Polish media reports.

For those Americans who are concerned about a constitutional crisis in the United States, weve got nothing on Poland, said R. Daniel Kelemen, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who focuses on Europe.

As right-wing, nationalist, populist governments have gained influence across the continent, notably in Hungary, Poland is the new battleground. There have even been suggestions of a Polexit, he said, referring to Brexit, Britains departure from the EU.

It all comes as right-wing movements have made gains across Europe, including in neighboring Germany, where a racist gunman last week killed nine people.

Demonstrators rally in support of judges outside the Court of Appeal in Katowice, where Judge Waldemar Zurek was called to appear in January.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images)

Under EU law, members are bound by legal standards that apply across the union. The EU, which Poland joined in 2004, has sued Warsaw repeatedly for tampering with the courts. Pressure has grown for the bloc to cut the billions of euros it sends each year to Poland. And the Polish Supreme Court recently declared that the countrys flouting of European law might force it to leave the EU.

When communism fell 31 years ago, Zurek enrolled in the countrys oldest university to become a lawyer. Over his 22 years as a judge in Krakow, he was hailed as a rising star for his caseloads and legal opinions, often on lawsuits between major corporations. He spent eight years on the National Council of the Judiciary, which appoints judges and reviews complaints about them, before he said the ruling party forced him out and installed its allies. The countrys major legal newspaper, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, once named him the best judge of Poland, and his name was floated to join the Supreme Court.

Most of that was before the Law and Justice party won parliamentary elections, first in 2015 and again last year on a platform of reforming the court system, which it said was overburdened, inefficient and rife with communist-era holdovers. Former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and twin brother Lech founded the party in 2001. Lech was president when he died in a plane crash in 2010. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is now in Parliament, wields tremendous influence on the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, who ran for office as a party member.

There is an ongoing war regarding the state of democracy in Poland, said Adam Bodnar, a government ombudsman and independent human rights monitor. We are in the last stages.

Judge Waldemar Zurek

(Jacek Taran / For The Times)

Representatives of the nations Ministry of Justice did not reply to requests for comment from the Los Angeles Times. In a December interview with the Polish Press Agency, Kaczynski said that judges actually do not bear the consequences of even their most unlawful and harmful actions, were part of a sick system and could be evil.

Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski, who has clashed with EU officials over Polands judicial transformation, said in an interview that critics were playing politics while the government was democratizing the courts and making them more transparent.

We have been accused of all kinds of crimes against democracy. Its not true, Jablonski said. We want our judges to stop being political. They should be impartial.

The words unnerve Zurek, who fears he will eventually be out of a job, or worse.

Poland is going backward, he said recently during a meeting in a cafe across the street from his court to avoid what he said was regular street harassment during interviews. The government now has a totalitarian mentality.

Zurek during his appearance at the Court of Appeal in Katowice.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

In Katowice, about an hour from his Krakow court, Zurek showed up last month on charges that he disobeyed the orders of a superior appointed by the ruling party to switch to a new court division. He has appealed the transfer.

Some of the accusations against us judges seem from the outside like we are picking small fights, he said in an interview. But these are tactics the government is using to set us up to fail. They give us new responsibilities, give us big caseloads, and dont give us adequate clerks, to set us up to fail all because we question the pseudo-reform of the judiciary.

He has also been investigated by the governments anti-corruption office on suspicion of not paying taxes, including on a tractor he sold five years ago. In another case, the government charged him for a tweet last year in which he criticized the appointment to the Supreme Court of an attorney aligned with the ruling party. Hes also faced criticism for participating in a public debate on the judiciary. Once a popular lecturer at the National School of Judiciary and Public Prosecution in Krakow, he has now been banned by his court from teaching.

Dozens of demonstrators showed up in support of Zurek at his hearing, as they do at many of the court proceedings against judges that have become commonplace around the country. They held Polish flags and posters that said wolne sady! The phrase means independent or free courts.

We will return to the dictatorship, because now all power will be in the hands of one party, just as it was during [communism], said Henryk Mizerski, a 70-year-old who was part of the Solidarity anti-communist movement of the 1980s.

This government isnt creating anything. Its only decomposing our law and society, said another demonstrator, Tadeusz Kus, 60.

Demonstrators attend a hearing at the Court of Appeal in Katowice, Poland, to support Zurek.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

Although tens of thousands have marched in Warsaw and elsewhere over the months in support of judges, they represent a small fraction of the countrys population of nearly 38 million. Among the nations 10,000 judges, about 1,000 at most have spoken up publicly or attended protests over the judiciary. Judges associations, which have been unified in their opposition, say many of their members stay quiet because they fear retribution.

Early this month, after the new law banning judges from criticizing the government was signed, thousands of Poles rallied in support in Warsaw by the Constitutional Tribunal building. They held signs that read popieram reforme sadow! I support court reform!

Justice is the strength and the foundation of the power of the Republic of Poland, protest leader Adam Borowski told the crowd. If this justice is not found in the courts, our homeland will be weak.

The Law and Justice partys successes in elections and pushing its agenda are in part a result of a healthy Polish economy and generous social welfare programs. Hovering around 5%, the unemployment rate is at a historic low. The government, meanwhile, has spent the equivalent of billions of dollars on programs popular with poor and middle-class Poles, including a 500 zloty monthly allowance about $126 for each child in a family, banning income taxes for 2 million workers under 26, and promising to nearly double the minimum wage by 2023.

Protesters hold banners in support of Zurek outside the Court of Appeal in Katowice.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

For a family that sees itself doing better under the party, the issue of courts seems like an obscure issue that doesnt affect it, said Bodnar, the government ombudsman. He added that the court overhaul also had its source in real problems.

The Polish judiciary does need substantial reform. There is a big backlog. In big cities, you may have to wait more than a year for the first hearing in a divorce case, Bodnar said. So when the government says there needs to be reform, people agree. But the actions the government takes are entirely different.

Zurek, who has become accustomed to the onslaught of critics, said he feared for the future of his country and his family.

After a demonstration last month in Krakow where he spoke, a drunken man cornered Zurek to yell at him about his speech, saying it was wrongly anti-government. Zurek said the moment reminded him of another incident that shocked the nation. In January 2019, Pawel Adamowicz, a liberal mayor of the northern city of Gdansk and well-known government critic, was stabbed to death on stage during a charity concert by a man who opposed his political views.

The government blamed the crime on a deranged man with a checkered past. Activists questioned whether bitter political divisions and the demonizing of government critics in the media played a role in the hatred.

I feel we judges are heading toward the same situation now, Zurek said, clutching a cross with a Polish eagle that he wears on his neck. I pray nothing happens to me.

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Poland judges face peril, even death threats, for criticizing right-wing government - Los Angeles Times