From a GP on your smartphone to a virtual reality programme that cures anxiety, there’s a brave new world of health technology on the horizon

Words: Rosie Ifould

Imagine: you wake up with a nagging pain in your stomach. You’ve noticed it a few times recently. So you pick up your phone and check your fertility app, your food allergies app and the sleep app that measures your biorhythms, in case the data you’ve logged gives you a clue as to what’s going on. Next, you head to the bathroom and step on the scales, not to check your weight but to monitor your heart rate and send the reading to your health coach. Still unsure of the cause, you decide to get the pain checked out, but rather than take the morning off work you log in to your online doctor service, and within 20 minutes, you’re talking to a GP via a video link, who then emails a referral to a specialist. With a few minutes left before you have to leave for work, you ask your voice- activated personal assistant to play a meditation programme to take your mind off it all.

But this isn’t the future. This could quite easily have been you this morning.

Welcome to the brave new world of health technology. We’ve gone far, far beyond the Fitbit craze of a few years ago to a range of AI platforms, virtual reality programmes and wearable tech that now allow us to not just monitor our health and wellbeing, but actively improve it. “Health tech is in such an exciting phase,” says Rosa Glover, chief product officer of BioBeats, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence for healthcare. “Just as the world of online shopping revolutionised the way we buy clothes, new technology is changing the way we manage our health. It’s so much easier for individuals to research conditions and treatments.” Want to tackle your anxiety? There’s an app for that. Need to check the food you buy won’t trigger your allergies? There’s an app for that, too. There’s even a revolutionary new app – Natural Cycles – which, just last month, was approved as a method of contraception: a massive breakthrough in women’s health.

Meet the new health technologies that might spell the end of waiting in a doctor’s surgery