I saw this entry in HealthNex which is actually a guest post by Doug Krell, MD. It talks about the future of healthcare IT from the perspective of thinking about what was in the movie Minority Report. It got me thinking too.
Minority Report's technology was mostly chosen on the advice of Peter Schwartz, scenario planning guru and principal at the Global Business Network (which incidentally has a recent and fascinating conversation on video with Howard Rheingold, a bleeding-edge technophile with a flair for wordsmithing).
Peter said in his most recent book Inevitable Surprises that his approach was to recommend technologies that were already working in the lab and would be commercial before the end of the decade. I looked into it more when I read his book last year and found out he was right - a lot of the technologies were at MIT and others elsewhere, but I didn't find anything I could recall from the movie that was far-fetched (well, except for the whole seeing into the future thing).
So Dr. Krell's wish list may not be so far off base. One set of his ideas that rang true with me is in this quote from the article:
For one thing, I believe that larger or multiple screen displays would be better for medicine. Voice recognition and transcription software needs to continue to improve. Touch-screen technology needs to be employed.
I would personally agree and embroider a bit more on the fantasy: I want a computer the size of my Nokia 770 that can project a screen image onto any wall with a square foot of available blank space, and an integrated inrafred keyboard. The latter is already commercial but separate from the computer, and I haven't heard much noise yet about the mini-projector idea; I actually thought it up myself but doubt I'm the first.
Some day soon.
Hi
Mini-projector using computer-generated hologram:
http://www.lightblueoptics.com
Eric
Posted by: Eric | February 22, 2006 at 08:53 AM