Unlocking the Future of Healthcare: Biomarkers and Personalized Medicine

1. Introduction

Healthcare is one of the basic needs of life since the good health of an individual is the primary objective for survival. Like any other industry, healthcare is also evolving to what we call smart healthcare which is said to have several billion-dollar turnover in the coming few years. Smart healthcare not only comprises of edge-cutting technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) but it also makes use of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Cloud Computing, Wireless Communication Technology (Fatima Alshehri, 2020), Telemedicine, Web-Technologies and Big Data (Asoke K. Talukder, 2021). It is proving to be a promising field, both for the patients and the healthcare workers. The early identification of forthcoming health concerns, planning of suitable future monitoring treatments, and creation of new evaluations can all be facilitated by the applications of new advances in precautionary laws and behavioral systems (Fatima Alshehri, 2020). Intelligent healthcare covers all aspects of prevention, identification, assessment and treatment of a disease. The goal is to overcome the barriers of awareness, accessibility and affordability in traditional healthcare (Asoke K. Talukder, 2021). The illustration of Smart Healthcare is shown in Figure 1.

Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences organizations use a variety of AI technologies nowadays, which brings us to the idea of Personalized Healthcare. It lays down solutions for the patients based on their genomic data which provides the most adequate information about how a person will respond to a particular drug and how much chance a person is prone to a particular disease in the future. The biomarker technology is also a promising field for identifying certain conditions in the body. A definition of biomarkers has been established based on International Chemical Safety by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a collaborative initiative with the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation. According to this definition, a biomarker is described as any compound, its structure or its biological process, detectable in the body or its derivatives that has the capacity to impact or forecast the occurrence of outcomes for any disease (Kyle Strimbu, 2011).

Despite the fact that AI can perform healthcare tasks in many instances just as well as or better than humans, the difficulties of implementation will prevent the roles of medical practitioners from being extensively automated for a considerable amount of time (Thomas Davenport, 2019). In this chapter, we shall discuss how AI and IoT play a major role in the advancement of healthcare and assist health professionals in making wiser decisions in less time to prevent adversity. With all their potential and capabilities, a few societal and ethical complexities that they possess, have also been discussed here (Pavel Hamet, 2017).

Figure 1.

Aspects of Smart Healthcare (Shuo Tian, 2019)