Technology has the potential to enhance our health and even help us live longer.
There's a slew of apps out there aiming to revitalize the health care industry, like ZocDoc for helping find doctors and making appointments, and Runkeeper for tracking your fitness.
But more importantly, there have been major breakthroughs in cancer treatment, health information collection, and medicine all thanks to technology.
Prosthetic limbs that can feel
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory are working on a new kind of medical plastic that can interface with human tissue and "talk to it," meaning it can work with nerves and muscles without damaging them.
There are an estimated 2 million people in the U.S. alone who are living without certain limbs, according to the Amputee Coalition. The goal of Sandia National Laboratory's research is to improve an amputee's control over his or her limbs with help from their own nervous system.
Big data treats cancer
Healthcare companies are tapping into Hadoop, a big data tech that lets business sift through giant volumes of information to answers questions. This is particularly great for cancer research because cancer is a tough problem to solve.
Cancer cells mutate differently in each person and react to drugs differently based on a person's genetic makeup. So companies are working on ways to put the human genome into Hadoop to help predict which treatments will work best with individuals. Some of these Hadoop-using companies include Crossbow, UNC-CH Lineberger Bioninformatics Group, and Hadoop-BAM.
Big data makes drugs safer
Another Hadoop company, Cloudera, worked with the FDA to create a database of drug interactions. It will help predict how dangerous it is for a patient to take multiple drugs at once.
If a person takes multiple medications and they negatively interact that can seriously harm or kill the person.
Cloudera is also working with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine to predict and prevent disease. The goal is to analyze human and bacterial genomes, study metabolic pathways of normal and disease states in the organism, and better understand how certain molecules can treat diseases.
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