Medical-related artificial intelligence could be the way of the future. The thought of high-tech devices tracking our health and giving us medical advice, diagnosing our condition or even performing certain medical tasks is scary to some but recently IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization, conducted a survey about how millennial parents feel about how these issues affect their children and the result may shock you.
Technology has continued to change the medical industry and the near future is no exception. What we have in our hospitals is simply amazing compared to what we had 100 years ago and 100 years from now medicine will no doubt be unrecognizable from what we have today. Change, however, can be a little scary at times. Which is why public opinion can play a large role in determining which technologies get rolled out faster. To put it another way, the more accepting the public is about a new medical technology the more money there is to be made.
To understand public opinion on new technology IEEE has put out a survey on how millennial parents think about new medical technology. One topic that was discussed was the use of wearable devices.
Wearable Devices
Soon these devices will be available to the public that will be able to track patient health. Healthcare professionals will be able to use this information to track changes in a patient’s health and give better care. As of right now, parents across the world are in favor of using technology like this to monitor children up to the age of five. The numbers get even more favorable when we include children in their teens.
If you ask me this raises more than a few questions. First off, is the health of our children suffering some kind of epidemic that would require constant monitoring? I can see using this technology to monitor certain conditions in children. Especially at ages where they cannot communicate how they are feeling or don’t know the warning signs of serious symptoms. Let's say a child is diabetic and needs to have their blood sugar checked regularly. Then using a device like this would make sense to me, but to use this tech on a healthy child seems like overdoing it.
Looking back at my own childhood I can’t think of a single moment in which I would have benefited from having my health monitored. On top of that, we need to consider our child’s privacy. I am sure there are a lot of parents that believe that their children do not have a right to privacy but as a child grows into their teenage years I am certain that the kids feel differently.
The truth is we won’t really know the benefits of using wearable devices until we give it a try and for now it seems the parents of the world are onboard. I am willing to see where this technology takes us, I just hope we use the right about of caution.
Below are the results of the survey on this topic. Tell us what you think.
To learn more about IEEE and their survey please visit their website.
