21-th Century Medicine: Digital - Computable - Algorithmic

Cris Doloc

Context: Humanity has experienced a spectacular technological progress in the last 150 years. This progress has generated products and processes that save labor, entertain and socially connect people. The desired effect was to enable enriched and long lives. But there are currently plenty of reasons to question the effects that Science and Technology has had on the society as a whole.

Creativity Crisis: Billions of people are constantly connected, the sequencing of the human genome was completed, new nano-materials are developed while modern machine learning algorithms are able to process billions of gigabytes of data. Was this great technological advancement conducive of palpable progress in curing ailments such as Alzheimer's, Cancer or obesity. The current approaches seem to be often uninspired, and there is a belief that the world is experiencing a "Creativity Crisis".

Possible Solution: A possible solution to this global problem is the advent of a new interdisciplinary field - a Convergent discipline that does not even have a name. It is situated at the intersection between the realms of Life Sciences (Biology and Medicine), Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Digital Medicine: The field of Digital Medicine is the most recent and palpable aspect of this Convergence between Medical Bio sciences and Tech. The term was first coined in 2002 by Shaffer and it was defined as that technology and those products that are undergoing rigorous clinical validation and/or that ultimately will have a direct impact on diagnosing, preventing, monitoring or treating a disease, condition or syndrome.