Almost all illnesses can in some form be derived from your diet, lifestyle and the environment around you. Today we know enough about the human body, it’s DNA and metabolism to essentially keep us 100% healthy and disease-free all the time. What’s lacking is data. We need accurate real-time measurements of our blood, tissues and breathing-air. This data then needs to be cross-checked with our genes and habitats. The insight could help you naturally intercept and neutralize almost all illnesses long before they manifest.
Today you can consult a personal trainer, a nutritionist and a doctor, only to get three different diagnoses and maybe a couple of pills to hide some symptoms. There’s simply not enough time to give everyone the attention they need, or to stay up-to-speed on every new research breakthrough. Instead, in a couple of years, your wrist-worn activity trackers will have graduated into cloud-connected, tattoo-like patches and micro-implants; packed with connected sensors and without the need to charge. Together they will know what your body needs long before you do.
You might be sceptical to the idea of ingesting and implanting various health-trackers, just like people once gasped at something as bizarre as a pacemaker. As always, early adopters will show the way, and in this case they are bound to stick around a lot longer than the sceptics. Being a persistent early-adopter myself, I had my DNA sequenced and charted several years ago and I’m currently tracking several biometric features daily. However, the systems aren’t communicating so no conclusions can be made from the contexts. For example, my sleep-tracker doesn’t suggest improvements to my work schedule and my activity tracker doesn’t care what I had for breakfast.
We all know willpower is a finite resource when you want to cook a healthy meal. Now imagine a quick on-demand-recipe adjusted to make you super-energized and healthy while at the same time tailored to be delicious for your specific tastebuds and cravings. If you have any vitamin or mineral deficiency at the moment you request the recipe, it will be factored into the shopping-list of ingredients. As a bonus, both your health-insurance and your taxes will be much cheaper since everyone effectively avoids hospitalization and expensive drugs.
Even basic therapeutical needs will be tended by these intelligent systems. A shrink might have to probe you with a hundred questions to find the root cause of an anxiety. A personal health system would know exactly when feelings of depression or anxiety occurs based on your pulse, brain-activity, voice level, perspiration and hormone balance. This data is then cross-checked with your current diet, sleep- and exercise-habits as well as home situations and workload. After a few days it will tell you the root cause of your anxiety and how to best cure it, free and without drugs.
So what will pharmaceutical companies and doctors do when almost all medical issues are neutralized long before they cause any trouble? We’ll still need help with congenital diseases and broken bones, but the final holy grail of medicine would be to tackle aging. Every day 100.000 people die from age-related diseases globally. Ageing deteriorates your body as well as your senses, memory and cognitive ability. The process is often painful and the mortality rate is 100%. Many successful entrepreneurs have already gone to work here. Google recently started the $1.5 billion research center Calico to “cure death”.
