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Achieve holistically and individually optimized medical care and healthcare via technology.
The world’s major technology corporations, including Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), and Amazon have designated medical care and healthcare a key strategic area for R&D and commercialization using their own technologies. This digital health market is expected to grow to a size of approximately 56 trillion yen, which is about 420 billion USD, by 2025. This trend has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Open innovation created through the collaboration of medicine and engineering.
Advancement of vital signs monitoring
One of the technological advancements driving digital health is vital signs monitoring.
In addition to wearable devices represented by Apple Watch, in recent years, we have seen significant development in technologies that monitor vital signs data such as heart rate and respiration in a contactless manner.
New insight gained from analysis of vital signs data
The advancements of vital monitoring will make it possible to obtain continuous vital data outside of hospitals, which until now could only be obtained with medical equipment in hospitals, and may lead to new discoveries about disease and health.
For example, there is research that showed the relevance between vital signs data obtained from fitness trackers Fitbit and infection with COVID-19.
New possibilities in medicine and healthcare
If we can achieve a one-stop system that predicts the risk of developing diseases based on daily vital signs, proposes personalized health recommendations according to those risks, and provides appropriate diet, exercise, and sleep services as a means of implementing these actions, it is expected a new healthcare industry to be created.
In the future, we can even imagine the delivery of preventive medicine, in which doctors intervene based on changes in daily vital signs data, rather than seeing a doctor after we become ill.
