In a world grappling with numerous health challenges, including aging populations, sedentary lifestyles, and emerging viruses, Guillaume Bremond, President of Visiomed—a company specializing in high-tech health centers based in the Arabian Peninsula—highlights the upcoming trends in the digital health market. He advocates for a future of health that is predictive, personalized, participative, and most importantly, preventive.
The global population is facing new health risks, particularly related to the aging demographic, with projections indicating that by 2050, one in six people will be over the age of 65, compared to one in ten today. Additionally, over 3.5 billion people are currently highly vulnerable to climate change. The world is also experiencing increased geopolitical and geo-economic instabilities.
In this environment, digital technologies are becoming increasingly essential to help people live longer and healthier lives. New and emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance medical monitoring, diagnostics, wellness, and access to healthcare. On an individual level, technology is improving quality of life through innovative medical devices and services that allow for regular, and sometimes continuous, reliable health monitoring.
At the level of medical innovation and healthcare professionals, the use of collected data is enabling the development of new solutions that provide more accurate diagnoses and increasingly personalized responses. Nationally, new technologies are helping to guide health policies based on concrete and virtuous objectives: improving disease prevention and well-being at all ages, reducing social and healthcare access inequalities, and addressing the disparities related to aging and disability.
One of the key promises of digital health is its fundamentally preventive and personalized nature. This approach represents a major shift in medical practice, as prevention has become an indispensable part of the evolution of healthcare systems. This is a significant change from the historically curative nature of medicine, which is now being reshaped by the concept of "4P" medicine—personalized, predictive, preventive, and participative.
Personalized medicine acknowledges that an individual's health is significantly influenced by their genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle. With the aid of new technologies, including medical (DNA sequencing, marker analysis and tracking), social, and societal tools, personalized care can now be provided to determine the most relevant prescriptions for treatments, lifestyle modifications, dietary changes, and exercise routines.
