The Diagnosis and Treatment of Pre-Diseases: A Look at the Future

One of the interesting aspects of the deployment of new wearable medical devices is the use of sensors attached to patients that have the capability of monitoring disease progression in a manner never before possible. This idea was discussed in a recent article (see:IBM Research develops fingerprint sensor to monitor disease progression). Here is a brief excerpt from it:IBM...announced that it has developed a small sensor that sits on a person ’s fingernail to help monitor the effectiveness of drugs used to combat the symptoms of Parkinson’s and other diseases. Together with the custom software that analyzes the data, the sensor measures how the nail warps as the user grips something.Because virtually any activity involves gripping objects, that creates a lot of data for the software to analyze. Another way to get this data would be to attach a sensor to the skin and capture motion, as well as the health of muscles and nerves that way. This new article brought to mind my blog note of about ten years ago in which I discussed what I then referred to as thehealth continuum ranging from predisposition to disease => diagnosed predisease => acute or chronic disease (see:Predisposition to Disease and Pre-Disease on the Health Continuum). Pertaining to the predisposition to disease and diagnosed predisease, I made the following comment at that time:[O]ne of the most interesting questions associated with the early disease model is whether it is appropriate ...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Diagnostics Pharmaceutical Industry Source Type: blogs