Today’s Throw Forward Thursday is pre-recorded, I’ve actually been in hospital myself, but the content is strangely appropriate as we consider how to proactively and preventatively take care of ourselves.
We don’t have to jump too far into the future to imagine a healthcare system that integrates smart technology with AI and machine learning to produce healthcare apparatus, some as simple as plasters and bandages, that are able to provide significant upgrades to the care we are currently able to receive while injured.
But the point of this video is less about impressing you with visions of medical futures, and more about reminding you that seemingly small and technologically easy advances in almost every industry are going to make very big differences to our lives in the next few years. The rest of the 2020s is going to be a mind-blowing blur of these small, but world-changing advances.
What can you imagine for your industry, and which of those ideas could you start to experiment with in 2023?
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Throw Forward Thursday. My name is Graeme Codrington and come with me to the future of medicine.
Come with me to a time when plasters and bandages that we put on our wounds don’t just cover over the wound on our bodies, but actually have smart technology built into them. This could happen in a variety of ways, although an expensive but very clever way of doing it is probably using graphene as part of the materials. But we don’t have to wait for graphene to become affordable, we will be able to put the internet of things, put smart technologies into bandages, into plasters, that will do two things.
First of all, they will give us instant feedback as to what’s happening in the wound. Now, imagine a plaster that will change colour depending on whether the wound is healing or maybe getting a little bit septic. That’s a very simple version but would be fantastic. But imagine it goes further and sends us actual data via an app that gives us information on how we are actually healing or whatever it is the underlying condition is and what happens if we could go a step further and infuse those bandages and plasters with whatever we need for healing, whether it’s medicines or stem cells or whatever we need, and they are smart bandages, which will release that medical or whatever it is, a medical substance or whatever it is, or maybe increase or decrease the pressure of the bandage with a little bit of artificial intelligence assistance.
Use a lot of words to say, come with me to the future where we can see smart plasters and smart bandages. It’s going to happen. It’s probably happening already.
As always, thank you for joining me in the future, where we stretch our strategic imaginations about what might be possible in the future, and we invite ourselves to have a conversation about what it might mean for us today.
If you’re in the medical world, one of the biggest things we need to be working on is making sure that whatever we do is infused with smart technology and that will allow us to go a step further than we go at the moment, and that would be to create a proper preventative healthcare system.
But now I’m going further than we normally go. In fact, from February of 2023, we are going to go further with our Throw Forward Thursday videos. Every week, we’re going to have a look at technology from the future and then I’m going to take you behind the scenes and help you to think like a futurist and take what we can see in the future and apply it to our world today. But more information on that next week.
For now, have a great week in the world of today. Let your mind go to the world of tomorrow. I’ll see you next week.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.