Clinicians in the near future will find themselves working with information networks on a scale well beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp, thereby necessitating the use of intelligent machines to analyse and interpret the complex interactions of data, patients and clinical decision-making. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to embed intelligent behaviour into software in order to achieve narrowly constrained objectives in an increasingly wide domain of practice. In healthcare the field of AI research includes expert systems that provide guidance for clinical decision-making, computer vision algorithms that outperform human beings in the analysis of … [Read more...] about Physiotherapy clinicians perceptions of AI in clinical practice
Second skin
The sociologist Anthony Giddens has commented that in the future, the 'normal' body may only be the most basic form of embodiment available to us, and that bodily enhancements like eyes that can zoom, ears with extended hearing range, and designer prosthetic limbs to supplement today's spectacles and hearing aids will vastly extend the bodies of those who can afford them. Some of these innovations sound farfetched, but there's no doubt that the ability to shape and enhance our bodies will be attractive to many people, and will have a big impact on physiotherapy work. If it's possible in the future to have a fully autonomous transport network, it's likely to put an end to most head … [Read more...] about Second skin
Can you teach physiotherapists to be empathic?
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the capabilities that health professionals will need in the future. This is partly because the sheer economics of future healthcare will mean that other ways of delivering routine tasks - those that once required extensive training and expensively employed specialists to deliver them - will be given managed by smart machines, wearables, robotics and AI. A friend of mine was saying the other day that she recently sat with her elderly mother in hospital for two weeks during a bout of illness, and during that time only two of the nurses actually took time to build a relationship with them. The others just came in to do things to her: … [Read more...] about Can you teach physiotherapists to be empathic?
Will technology make physiotherapy obsolete?
A few weeks ago, I took part in a panel discussion on the theme of 'The university is dead: Long live the university'. The keynote presenter - the very brilliant Professor Jane Gilbert - talked about how technology is going to disrupt every aspect of our lives in the future. Ever since the talk I've been pondering how much technology will disrupt the kinds of physiotherapy people might need in the future. Here are just three examples of disruptive technologies and ways of thinking and working that are due for a shakeup in the very near future: Fact-based technical subjects, like the kinds of science-bases subjects commonly thought of as 'core' subject in physiotherapy (anatomy, … [Read more...] about Will technology make physiotherapy obsolete?