Health 4.0
Over the past century, tremendous strides have been made across various facets of health and healthcare. From the promotion of antiseptic surgery and use of antibiotics in the early 1900s to genome editing in the 2000s, new science and innovations have driven substantial improvement in care delivery and outcomes. However, the rapid population and societal transformations of the next few decades will require the deployment of better tools and technologies that will enable us to lead longer, healthier and more productive lives while controlling non-sustainable cost and achieving better access to care for populations across the world.
What is Health 4.0?
The concept of Health 4.0 addresses the broad possibility of applying the technologies of Industry 4.0 to improve healthcare. In this commentary we address the challenges and perspectives of Health 4.0 and how the risk of lack of control can delay its emergence.
Healthcare is one of the sectors with the highest expectations for positive impacts of the 4.0 revolution. For decades, the world population has grown exponentially, a fact that has been associated with advances in medicine, better health in aging populations, and longer life expectancies. However, this trend has also posed demands on healthcare systems, which must deal with the challenge of providing care without raising costs, given the fiscal constraints of the governments that provide such services to the population.
Technologies
Health 4.0 proposes a more connected health system where, for instance, with the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) even a hospital bed may be connected to the network, thereby providing and making use of data. However, a large part of the world population unfortunately still does not have access to such innovative improvements and likely will not in the forthcoming years.
The fourth revolution promises to transform health by providing more accurate and personalized service. This personalization of medicine will boost the emergence of increasingly effective and near-real-time treatments. This can be achieved through the integration of medical devices, with cyber-physical systems, software building blocks, Big Data tools, IoT, 5G, among other features .
4.0 Technologies for Health Industry
Cyber-Physical System
The Health 4.0 Cyber-Physical System (HCPS) contains several types of computers, communications, storage, interfaces, biosensors, and bio-actuators. The HCPS paradigm permits observing processes from the real world, as well as monitoring patients before, during, and after surgical procedures using biosensors.
Internet of Things
Health 4.0 proposes a more connected health system where, for instance, with the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) even a hospital bed may be connected to the network, thereby providing and making use of data. However, a large part of the world population unfortunately still does not have access to such innovative improvements and likely will not in the forthcoming years.