Meet RoboDoc: Could Robots Make Doctors Obsolete?

If you've ever felt the first twinge of a headache and immediately headed over to Google to look up your symptoms and find a potential treatment, you could be inadvertently contributing to a vision of the future. One where our regular GPs are replaced with automated diagnosis and robots. Nor are you alone for that matter. A recent survey in the UK by The UK Digital Health Report, found that 1 in 4 adults were seeking diagnosis online and that this rate was increasing by a massive 20 percent per year. Experts are now predicting that a combination of technological advancements and robotics could soon render much of a doctors' role in health care redundant. With patients able to self-diagnose using continuously improving technology and a growing uptake in its use, it seems the experts may be right. The trend for Internet self-diagnosis is already global; millions of people every day look up their symptoms and seek treatments without ever seeing a doctor. A visit to the GP or a tap of an App The app market too has been flooded with systems designed to help us monitor our health, diagnose our own symptoms and find the right treatment for our problem. There are apps for pregnant women to time and monitor their contractions, apps to help track blood pressure, apps which allow users to undergo an eye test and even apps that indicate possible serious ill health, such as cancer. In all cases there is no doctor involved where once they would have been a central feature. Surgery...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news