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Will the Internet of Things be the solution to make healthcare less expensive?

Sogeti Labs
April 24, 2013

Imagine a world… Where an ambulance is stopping in front of your door and asks you friendly to step inside. The reason being the fact that a computer in some monitoring lab has picked up some unusual value in your blood. The ambulance staff tells you that you will get a heart attack in less than two hours. So it would be smart to step inside. What would you do? Would you step inside the ambulance or would you tell the staff that they are invading your privacy…? Freescale Semiconductor is a company in embedded processing solutions. Their most recent product is one of world’s smallest chips: Kinetis KL02. The SingularityHub writes:

“Microcontrollers are computers, complete with processor, hard disk, RAM, and communication and analog connections. The KL02 has 32 KB of flash storage and 4 KB of RAM. 1976’s Apple II came stock with 4 KB of RAM. The microcontroller is 1.9 mm by 2.0 mm, what means a 56 KL02 microcontroller would fit on just one of the keys I’m using to type this article.”
Now, you might ask: how will the Internet of Things make healthcare less expensive than? These types of chips in combination with computers and algorithms can monitor our blood and discover diseases so we can take action in an early stadium. When diseases can be discovered in an early stadium, treatment can be more effective This means less costs. But as always there are two sides to this story.Generally speaking, we got two types of people when we talk about healthcare: sick people and healthy people. Sick people could be more happy with these types of innovations and solutions within healthcare because they benefit more. Healthy people might feel that their privacy is being violated because their trade off is bigger. Technology is quickly moving closer towards us and gets ‘under our skin’ with digital tattoos and micro chips. So the question is: how much privacy are you willing to give up for cheaper healthcare? Source en image credits: Singularityhub & OurBusinessNews

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SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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