Our ONE Prediction for the New Decade:
Assisted Homeostasis

It's that time of the year again: when everyone brings out their crystal balls to try and predict the future. And the advent of a new decade encourages us to predict on a different scale — predicting for a year involves seeing where the world is moving technology-wise, and calling it out. Predicting for the next decade invites us to imagine how technology and market trends will converge.

And no, this isn't another top ten technology trends list. We have only ONE technology prediction, and it's something you probably haven't heard before. Ready? Here it is:

The next decade will see the rise of a new kind of medical technology — something we call ‘assisted homeostasis’.

Homeostasis

Homeostasis is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the human body. Homeostasis is the ability of the human body to maintain one or more parameters within a narrow range of acceptable limits. Think of body temperature, for example. A healthy person's body temperature is regulated to within a very small range — a few tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. This is achieved using a complex network of physiological instruments including various glands, the nervous system, the muscular system, the circulatory system and of course the brain! These instruments create a complex chain of causes and effects, which can be thought of as an exquisite control system — one with various robust fallback options. But if this control system ever does fail, the result is either a fever, or hypothermia.

There are many examples of homeostatic feedback control loops in the human body, and a lot more will no doubt be discovered in the future. We already know that physiological feedback control loops exist that control parameters like blood sugar, blood oxygen level, heart rate, the sleep cycle, stomach pH and fat storage. What happens when such a homeostatic loop stops functioning, or functions faultily? Disease! Some kinds of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, insomnia: these are some diseases that can be thought of as failures of homeostatic feedback loops.

Assisted Homeostasis

Proper homeostasis plays a crucial role in maintaining health. Assisted homeostasis is the next step in what technology can bring to the table. Assisted homeostasis augments natural control systems of the human body with artificial control systems to achieve homeostasis.

A simple (but important) example would be the treatment and management of diabetes. Many diabetic patients continuously monitor their own blood sugar and inject a certain amount of insulin based on it. In a sense, these patients are assisting their own homeostasis loops to maintain blood sugar levels, using their understanding and experience of their own physiology. This type of treatment depends on manual intervention to promote homeostasis, and is being practiced all over the world today. To be able to do this using automatic means in a continuous feedback loop would be assisted homeostasis. Controlling blood sugar using assisted homeostasis would involve continuous monitoring of blood sugar levels, and automated injection of appropriate amounts of insulin based on these monitored levels. (Some technologies for diabetes have recently ventured in this direction.)

Even though such technologies aren't widely available to patients and professionals yet, we believe technology is progressing in a direction that would make this possible in the near future. Assisted homeostasis would change the way many diseases are treated (and even cured), improving lifestyles for millions. For one thing, assisted homeostasis provides much more precise control of the drugs or therapy released into the body. This reduces negative side-effects of over- or under-dosage. Secondly, with precise control, it becomes possible to decide exactly how much to take over from the natural homeostatic loop, and how much to let it fend for itself. This means that dependence on external support is kept to a minimum. By sensing the dynamic behavior of the homeostatic loop, assisted homeostasis could provide precise support as needed, while eventually weaning the biological system off external support to reduce dependence.

So here's our prediction: in the Twenties, we will see more and more examples of advanced medical systems and algorithms coming together to perform ‘assisted homeostasis’. This will fundamentally change how we treat many non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, obesity, addiction, chronic pain, insomnia, asthma, blood pressure and many others.

Which current technology trends will converge to make assisted homeostasis feasible? What are the challenges? Why haven‘t they already been solved? What makes us believe these challenges can be solved in the near future? Stay tuned for the concluding half of this article, coming soon on our Future Tech blog series.

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