Wearable medical devices and healthcare technology are on the rise.
Deloitte Global predicted that 320 million consumer health and wellness wearable devices would ship worldwide in 2022, reaching nearly 440 million units by 2024 as more offerings become available to the market and healthcare providers become more comfortable with their use.
Items such as smartwatches that are already vastly popular are beginning to adapt to have more advanced capabilities, with heart monitors already being standard on many smartwatches and being able to detect potential abnormalities.
During the pandemic, smartwatches that measured blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) became more widely available, alerting people with low SpO2, which would otherwise be difficult for people to detect by themselves.
Digital health technologies (DHTs) – devices, products, and advanced technologies such as robotics – are making the creation, processing, and transmission of health data easier than ever.
Countries such as Germany are addressing digitalisation as a priority, with the Digital Healthcare Act, which provides reimbursement for health apps as well as for other DHTs.
Though uptake for such funding and reimbursement across Europe is slow, this is likely to change as DHTs become more popular and precision medicine adapts and evolves.
Major strides in disease treatment
As evidenced by the mRNA vaccine, there have been significant changes in the development of vaccines and treatments in the healthcare/pharma space.
Due to these recent technological advances, personalised mRNA vaccines for cancer could be developed in a short timeframe, though precision medicine is still very much in the early stages.
Potential developments have shown through numerous animal and human trials using mRNA cancer vaccines that there is promise in the technology, opening up the opportunity to discover new treatment options for rarer diseases that lack the standard treatment protocol of more common ailments.
