It Came From Outside – 5 Great Examples of Technologies from Outside of Healthcare

This article will explore 5 of our favourite examples of technologies that were initially alien to healthcare but are becoming integral parts of it. 1. Want to cure diseases? Let’s play a game! If your Mum told you as a child that video games aren’t any good, then now you might want to give her a call to tell her that she was wrong. Case in point: Foldit, an online computer game where players can contribute to better understand proteins and ultimately, help curing diseases. By solving puzzles, anyone, without any prior biochemistry knowledge, can try to fold protein structures as perfectly as possible to reach a high score and improve their global rank. The highest scoring structures will then be analyzed by scientists to better understand a given protein’s structure (or how it “folds”) and determine its potential use in curing diseases and finding new vaccines. So far, the crowd-sourced solutions from Foldit have yielded promising results. In 2010, researchers published their findings about how results from Foldit’s community of gamers provided results which were as good as or even better than algorithmically computed solutions. A year later, in 2011, Foldit players generated protein models that helped better understand an AIDS-related problem that kept baffling scientists for years, and the gamers outdid the latter ones in merely 3 weeks! While breakthroughs of that amplitude have become less prominent, Foldit is still going strong with regular up...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: 3D Printing Artificial Intelligence Future of Medicine Security & Privacy digital health Source Type: blogs