I gave a talk at the Escola Superior de Tecnologias da Saúde, a school that trains for many of the health professions, such as physiotherapists, opticians, nutritionists, pathology technicians, etc. I Discussed:
- the changing paradigms in data acquisition in medical practice and research, increasingly based on sensors and continuous monitoring, the mergence of new data types such as full microbiome characterisation and the increasing complexity of the data used in medicine.
- the emergence of new actors in the medical scene from the individual who are increasingly involved in the “quantified self” movement (wikipedia), to sensors and robots that are slowly but steadily taking over the activities performed by diverse medical professions
- the challenge of understanding what training should be provided for these health professions when technology is completely changing them, eventually rendering them obsolete, as well as the individual challenge of current students-in-training of understanding how they will prepare themselves to a career that is unlikely to last their full professional life