Telehealth

[Louise]

Not exactly a health product, so please forgive me for posting here, but it will be a product all the same. There is a whole heap of money going into the concept of tele-medicine and tele-health.

If you think you don’t know what I’m talking about, put Simply it is the ability to obtain a consultation with your doctor over the telephone or visual telephone (FaceTime, Zoom etc)

Going forward this is going to be a mega-bucks industry, with wearables being linked into your GP’s database.

Even the table you take can send a signal to your GP to let them know you took the tablet.

Is this an exciting future in healthcare, or one which we should steer away from at all costs?

[Holley]

personally I preferred being able to have a all back from my GP, it was so much easier and saved me the journey, hassle and delay of attending the appointment.

[Pansy]

We are nearly 2 years on from the original post and it is now common practice to have ‘virtual wards’

So patients can get sent home early from hospital or be prevented from coming into hospital by the use of virtual wards. Patients are given monitors and they get contacted to see how they are doing and what the monitors are recording. This is definitely the future of health care, it is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes slick, but this is the future and I agree with the OP, wearables will be a huge industry in the very near future.

[Ursula]

I think there are some big companies working of the ‘wearables’ for this future, think Amazon, Elon Musk and others…. Next comes the chip!

[Louise]

I think there are some big companies working of the ‘wearables’ for this future, think Amazon, Elon Musk and others…. Next comes the chip!

I agree, the wearables will be big money, we are already seeing the blood sugar monitor Zoe become mainstream, watches now perform more health functions than ever, our scales are linked to our phones. Whether we like it or not, it is the future.

[Vera]

Isn’t Elon Musk looking at putting a chip in peoples brains? I’m not really sure why, and what the benefit would be, but there is definitely a race to produce wearables or implants

[Holley]

How does this telehealth really work though? It’s fine if you are young, able to understand technology and have dexterity and mental faculty. But if you don’t and a lot of older people don’t, they will find telehealth hard and may not give accurate readings.

It also relies heavily on communication networks to be functional.