Medical Devices with Super Hero-like powers?

By Dave Hadfield, VP Customer Solutions with editorial support from Jon Nelson, VP Operations

I recently attended COFES 2014 (The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software), an excellent technology conference for all things engineering related.  The theme of COFES this year was “Correcting 2020 Vision”.  As Brad Holtz pointed out, this was a (rather clever) double entendre.  COFES 2014 was all about looking out toward the year 2020 - or really the future, attempting to predict the future and working within the cone of potential outcomes to make better decisions about today. 

One of the things that struck me was the imminent rise of some new and exciting technologies and how this may change our lives.  Being that I work in the cross hairs of product lifecycle optimization and automation and medical devices, I thought it would be fun to consider how these technologies might change the kind of products our customers might make.  By reading this blog you will learn two things about me, first I am a nerd and second I am a Broncos fan.

Let’s consider just a few of the exciting ideas that were discussed:

• Batman-Like Visualization Powers: Paracosm is working on making 3D cameras available to Google phones.  Each time people take pictures, selfies and the like the camera collects depth (the third dimension).  This data can be stored within the cloud, in combination with GPS data to start to produce a 3D image and geometrical understanding of the world we live in.  If you remember in Batman Begins, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) scolded Batman (Christian Bale) for a slightly more advanced version of this, leveraging similar technology.  Since neither Google nor Batman do evil, I am going to assume this will be used for good things.  One such example was using medical robots (a medical device) inside hospitals to help doctors achieve more patient consultation.  The 3D representation of a hospital can help the robot navigate from patient to patient.  Then the robot could provide a SKYPE like connection to a specialist that might be absent that day. 
• Iron Man’s Personal Assistant:  Remember Jarvis from Iron Man?  Well Watson could become a bit like Jarvis.  If you don’t remember, Watson was the Artificial Intelligent brain that won jeopardy, beating out Ken Jenkins (who had won Jeopardy 74 times in a row).  Now IBM with partner Fluid, Inc. is looking to bring Watson to the consumer, the first use case is a shopping assistant.  The app would eventually suggest products after learning about a customer’s preferences, according to IBM.  IBM plans to invest a billion dollars in this kind of artificial intelligence in the next few years.  So I wondered if we could build in personal medical assistants that could help doctors make diagnostic and treatment decisions. 
• Thor’s Hammer:  At COFES, Labori (a research organization) discussed how they are liberating 3D printers from the traditional box in which they have lived.  In this case to print entire buildings.   Printing buildings is not entirely new, for example, at TED in 2012 Behrokh Khoshnevis from University of Southern California (USC) gave a great talk on 3D printing buildings.  This approach, while mind blowing relies heavily on a single very large machine.  A similar approach is now being used in China by Winsun.  But as Labori pointed out, these approaches are limited due to the size constraints of a single robot.  It would be hard to print an entire IKEA store, for example, in this fashion.  Instead Labori is taking the approach of having multiple smaller 3D printing robots working in concert.  This reminded me of what Sri International is doing, printing small structures using many tiny 3D printers at mind-blowing speeds.  This leads me to believe that soon we will have robots racing about building and fixing all kinds of things (both large and small), probably in teams working in concert.  So then what if we could make tiny little 3D nanobots that could go into the human body and repair and possibly on the fly rebuild damaged organs?  It’s worth noting that indeed there are some companies like Organovo already printing organs with a variety of techniques.  One technique prints skin cells directly into a wound (even Luke Skywalker didn’t have it that good, but then we are talking future tech, not ones from “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”). 
• SHIELD Style Intelligent Devices:  A major topic was the “Internet of Things” (IoT), this is where real life devices are connected to the web, that is the same web as all the other technologies (Watson, 3D representation of the world and robots that go around building/repairing things).  Have you noticed now when you buy gadgets, they all want access to your Wi-Fi router?  It started off just as your PC, then your smartphone, then it was your PS3, printers, TV, DVD Player, ROKU, treadmill, thermostat, the lights in your house, your garage door, sprinkler systems, and now we are seeing it with kitchen appliances and even the insoles in our shoes.  With apps like “If-This-Then-That” (ITTT) we can program our lives and our stuff however we want.  One gentleman used ITTT to turn the lights on in his house when his Fitbit (smart wrist band) realized he had awoken each morning.  Not sure my eyes could take that immediately, but it demonstrated a powerful concept.  Thinking of some medical device usages for IoT are pretty easy.  GE Healthcare is already working on internet enabled medical stations you put in your house.  Diabetes patients might have continuous monitoring of blood sugar, with that data being transmitted to the cloud and to their doctor.  Sounds a bit scary with viruses and what not.  Dick Cheney was worried about his pacemaker and telemetry capabilities and being a hacker attack target.  This is a pretty valid kind of concern.  But assuming we can work out security there are bound to be countless opportunities to put the internet into medical devices.
• Robocop Style Drones: The topic of drones came up more than once at different points throughout the conference.  If you don’t know how drones are about to really change things up (they already are), check out the recent 60 minutes article on drones (Drones over America).  I started thinking about how drones could impact patient care, possibly being a first responder in an emergency. 

Based on just these five innovations, I would predict the following scenario involving a 55 year old male in the not too distant future:

• He is sitting at home busily munching on some Cheetos, drinking a Fat Tire, and watching the Denver Broncos about to win the Super Bowl.  A tiny little medical device is sitting under his skin, looking, waiting and monitoring every little vital sign, data happily transmitting to the cloud.

• Suddenly the Broncos quarterback scores the Super Bowl winning touchdown (clearly the most certain aspect of this prediction) and through his sheer excitement, his heart starts to fail him.  An artery has become blocked and cannot handle all the excitement!  Far quicker than an ambulance could respond, a drone carrying a mothership robot zooms to his front door.  Robot unlocks the door using secure emergency services access codes, stored in the cloud of course. 

• Next, the mothership robot enters and using a combination of GPS and Batman style 3D internal geometry makes a bee-line to the suffering fellow.  Robot is aware of the home layout and makes up for temporary obstacles with a variety of sensors and Watson like intelligence.

• The mothership robot already has a plan developed in its Watson-like cloud based mind (possibly being approved real-time by a centralized cardiac surgeon several states away).  The robot checks several vital signs and makes an on the fly tweak to the plan.  The robot injects the man with a syringe unloading thousands of nanobots to repair the blocked artery.  Each nanobot reports progress back to the mothership robot and the team of cardiac specialists simultaneously. 

• All this time the team of cardiac specialists is monitoring progress and a GPS driven ambulance is safely delivering real cardiac emergency responders to the man’s house at 100 MPH speeds.  All other cars are automatically pushed safely aside by their internet connected cars and GPS systems, making room for the ambulance.

As I am writing this, as a collective scenario this all feels kind of far-fetched and Marvel movie like. But when you look at the technologies discussed it really isn’t far away, it’s really just a matter of putting these pieces all together.  Life sciences companies will be motivated to do just that.  It’s no surprise then that both Apple and Google recently met with FDA.  What strikes me as the most unrealistic part of this story?  No, not the Broncos winning the superbowl again, but the fact the guy is having a heart attack in the first place.  I am hoping medical science can make those a thing of the past one day too.