Exponential Technologies and the Perfect Storm for Digital Health
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EDITORIAL
ISSN: 0970-4140 Coden-JIISAD © Indian Institute of Science 2020.
Exponential Technologies and the Perfect Storm for Digital Health Vijay Chandru* I was born in 1953, the year Mount Everest was scaled and the double helical structure of DNA was solved. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had already made their incredible breakthroughs in information science and theory, while computing machines were just about making a mark in public consciousness. The UNIVAC computer had successfully predicted the outcome of the US presidential elections in 1952 on television. With a sample of just 1% of the voting population, it famously predicted an Eisenhower landslide. For those of us who have worked in technology for the last seven decades, we feel extraordinarily fortunate to have witnessed and benefitted from the parallel advances in computing and molecular biology over the years. By some reasonable calculations, we can argue that computing entered the second half of the chessboard, an acceleration by a factor of 232 by 2006 some 48 years after the advent of Moore’s Law. Genome or DNA sequencing was not far behind and also made the cut, about 10 years later. It was no surprise that by 2012 that a top physician and genomics professor at the Scripps Translational Institute, Dr Eric Topol, was calling for medicine to be Schumpetered and called it a “Kairos moment in medicine.” For Dr Topol and his followers, the intellectual excitement in medicine was that we were on the verge of digitizing humans. But as Nandan and Seethalakshmi have pointed out in the lead article of this issue, the call for this digital or radical change in medicine could also come from social crises—either the spiraling costs of healthcare in some societies or the crying need for access in others. The latter is also poignantly brought out in the recent treatise “Bridgital Nation: Solving technology’s people problem” as reviewed by Professor Rudra Pratap in this issue. As Professor Ananthasuresh points out in the editorial, the idea of starting initiatives in digital health has been a topic of deep discussion for a group of us in the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science for a few seasons now. The image on the front cover of this issue was designed by
J. Indian Inst. Sci. | VOL xxx:x | xxx–xxx 2020 | journal.iisc.ernet.in
Professor Rudra Pratap who has been steering the digital health initiative in the campus. Incidentally, the repeated binary code in the figure carries a relevant message that the reader is invited to decipher. The workshop on digital health held in the Winter of 2019 in some ways channeled our focus and a tidy design of this special issue took shape. Indeed, a few papers presented at the workshop have been included in this issue. The perfect storm of COVID-19 struck soon after and the digital epidemiology elective that I had been offering at the Institute since 2017, in which we simulated nightmare pandemic scenarios in a classroom, were actually playing out as an unmitigated global human disaster. After the initial shock that
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