2015 EPPIC Annual Conference Keynote by Vivek Wadhwa

English: A photo of a robotic surgery facility taken by Tewari’s lab members in Weill Cornell Medical College. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Technology will eat medicine”.  EPPICon 2015 Annual Conference began with this prophetic reminder of what is to come, from the opening keynote, Vivek Wadhwa, Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.  Wadhwa shared the history of technology and stressed the mind boggling exponential growth that has happened in computing.  Now medicine will be transformed dramatically, said Wadhwa.  Also wide access has empowered innovation.  For instance, robots are built today by google and also by kids and with advance in microfluidics, we now have humans on a chip and Tesla (http://bit.ly/1Fw2qgt) will be driving itself, as robots become our companions (Review of play “Build” with robot companion http://bit.ly/165BOEd).  Perhaps the greatest challenge we will face in the years to come is what do we do with our time on this planet!

English: IBM’s Watson computer, Yorktown Heights, NY (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not only IBM’s Watson (http://bit.ly/JOZmwH, http://bit.ly/wCobOK), will deliver flawless diagnosis, in the years to come, but patients themselves now buy glucose meter, heart monitor, otoscope and more devices to diagnose themselves to find what ails them, as their phones now have become the most powerful medical research tools. Robotic surgeries are more precise and cost of genomic sequencing has dropped dramatically.  Medical innovation has globalized as access to technology is no more a privilage of the few.  In fact, said Wadhwa, “this is the most innovative period in history; today entrepreneurs can do what only governments could do earlier; solving humanity’s grand challenges”.

Here are some additional blog links for your convenience
“EPPICon 2015 Digital Health Panel Preview” http://bit.ly/1EQtd5y
“EPPICon 2015 Preview of Keynote by Kim Bush on “Tackling Global Health at Gates Foundation” http://bit.ly/18SV1cx
Feel free to browse my blog for past EPPIC conferences and other articles.