ORLANDO, Fla.—If you weren't blown away by anything at CTIA, you missed Wednesday's keynotes, which included a talk and demonstrations by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, chairman and CEO of the Institute for Advanced Health.
While the keynote was billed as Hans Vestberg's, president and CEO of Ericsson, it belonged to Soon-Shiong, who was kind enough to simplify his thoughts on the future of healthcare for those in attendance who might not be geniuses.
Vestberg took the stage with a flurry of awe-inducing projections: 50 billion connected devices by 2020; 5 billion mobile broadband users by 2016; 85 percent of the Earth has mobile coverage. They're numbers that only serve to reinforce CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent's repeated calls for more spectrum.
Vestberg's comments prior to introducing Soon-Shiong, however, are a refreshing reminder of what the global society has to gain if it can manage the spectrum crunch. He noted that every industry from public safety to education stands to gain from smarter networks and devices that are connected to a robust wireless infrastructure. But it was healthcare that Vestberg chose to highlight, inviting Soon-Shiong via satellite, as he was unable make it to the show because of a basketball injury.
The next 45 minutes included a complete rendering of our current healthcare system, with all of its inefficiencies deftly laid bare by Soon-Shiong, as well as a futuristic look at the impending paradigm shift in healthcare. In case you haven't already guessed, it's heavily dependent on all things wireless.
The future Soon-Shiong envisions will be less about end-result procedures and treatments and more about preventative real-time monitoring through a combination of biometric sensors, massive cloud-based knowledge stores and wireless technologies. It's a future where healthcare increasingly takes place in homes that are wired with connected devices that can track everything from blood pressure to insulin levels.
Soon-Shiong said trials are already underway where teams of nurses are able to monitor and treat up to 40,000 patients from a single call center. It's essentially a two-way, real-time exchange of information between patient and doctor. Think smart grid but for healthcare.
But that's just the beginning. Things really took flight when Soon-Shiong broke out his "Tapping the Human Interface" theory, as well as some truly mind-blowing demonstrations. It would be one thing if Soon-Shiong simply wanted to point the finger at a broken system and then ramble on about rainbows and unicorns, but the lofty concepts he's been toiling over are already being implemented in the real world.
The audience at Wednesday's keynote was treated to miraculous implementations of wireless and embedded technologies that are modeled after the way our senses interpret the world around us and then communicated with various brain centers.
Soon-Shiong displayed a pair of glasses that can balance the terrible involuntary tremors of a patient with Parkinson's. A paraplegic man on a video demonstrated dialing a cell phone using only his brain. There was a demonstration of a "nano system-on-a-chip" that can replace the retina, essentially restoring sight for the blind.
Of course, the most practical commercial-ready demonstration was of Money Reader, the new iPhone App that can identify money and objects in real-time just by pointing the phone's camera at an item. The benefits from the visually impaired of such a technology cannot be underestimated.
It was a keynote that won't soon be forgotten by those in attendance and one that proves that wireless technologies can and are being used in ways that intend to change our world for the better.