The students of the IT and Society Class of 2017 will present their work at Vitalis 2017 in Gothenburg. I wrote about the start of this years’ course in this blog post. This years’ student project was lead by Mikaela Eriksson (who has a bright future ahead of her as a leader). She worked hard in the project, and togehter with a team of around 30 students they have reserached the future of technology in healthcare in 2025. They also produced a YouTube film. This project was a collaboration with the county council in Uppsala and the topic of the project was set by them.

If you are interested in our work with this course, we have written several papers about it, and constantly improve it.

Below is the abstract to the student presentation.

See you at Vitalis! 

As a part of an interdisciplinary course, students from Uppsala University, Gannon University (US) and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (US), have collaborated with the Uppsala university Hospital to work on a vision for how healthcare can look like in 2025. With a technical background, our work has a different view on the field of healthcare. Not being limited by the present boundaries of healthcare regulations, we will present technologies from various areas and how they can be applied in future healthcare. With the patient in mind, we will answer questions such as:

 

• What are the possibilities provided by technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence?
• Can technology from the retail and banking sector be used in healthcare?
• How can the gaming industry influence the patient experience?

In order to explore healthcare services and understand the patient’s needs we made field visits, which included observing current ways of working and interviewing involved stakeholders. In order to summarise and conclude this research, we conducted vision seminars. As a method for participatory design, we invited healthcare professionals and patients to discuss the current situation and future visions together.

In our research we have observed a very scattered patient experience, involving long waiting times and misleading and/or limited information exchange between patient and healthcare professionals. Our research has shown that today’s healthcare could be improved by increasing patient involvement. Inefficient systems take time away from staff and current technology limits communication.
Based on our research regarding technology in healthcare, we will present different scenarios to describe our vision for how healthcare can look like in 2025. Using examples from chronic diseases (diabetes), temporary severe diseases (cancer), and accidents (head trauma), the goal was to cover multiple aspects of healthcare – before, during and after a hospital visit. Having real life situations allows us to illustrate how various kinds of technologies can improve the patient experience in different scenarios. The idea is to give examples of how future everyday life technology such as self-monitoring devices or virtual and augmented reality could be used to generate a more patient-centered and technology enhanced care.