From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

Can you discuss the future of intelligent things?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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Can you discuss the future of intelligent things?

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(upbeat music) - You know, I was reading about fight planes that change in size depending on traffic or buildings that somehow become structurally more sound because they can sense an earthquake coming. Can you talk a little bit about these intelligent things and then how you see this progressing for future inventions. - I mean this is something that's phenomenally exciting is that we're able to develop not only a combination of sensors, but materials and things that respond to our environments. Many of these things are what are often referred to as the connected city. There's one that I think is actually that's even more transformative that's coming, that is the idea of truly tailored medical treatments. This idea of precision medicine. And this was announced by President Obama in one of his State of the Union speeches which is how do we actually make that happen. And it starts with the idea of getting Americans to volunteer to give their data to scientists and bringing a large amount of that data in a responsible and safe, secure way so we can start getting this idea of like hey, the medical treatment for you might be different than for me. One size does not fit all. This idea of when you go in to the doctors office, they have enough data about you to really be able to treat you on demand. Right now when you go into the hospital, a lot of times they don't even have the data about you so they treat you from scratch. So we go into our get our drugs from Walgreens or Walmart or wherever you CVS, wherever you get them from, you're genomic data isn't on file there. We can sequence your data, but it's not actually used yet. So we're getting to that ability to start saying well this versus that. And that refinement, right now science has gotten really, has gotten much better, at being able to definitively start saying things like how do we actually tailor care, it's not like we don't we actually do do tailored care, but how do we enable it for everyone and how do we make it incredibly cost effective, and enrichen our scientific understanding to do so much more. And this has the ability to transform things in such a profound way. Not just from questions around how do we do detailed assessments around things like chemotherapy and cancer treatments, but all the way to other chronic diseases, or understanding where we live might have implications on our health. Living near freeways, living in other environments, our diet habits, type two diabetes. And that, the National Institutes of Health has started to establish a program for this called the All of Us campaign to bring this data together and those sensors that combine, that are increasingly becoming prevalent from your fitness trackers to the scales and pulling all that together allows us to about to enter a new realm of medical care. Not just for people with rare genomic diseases, but for all of us. (upbeat music)

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