Projected Top 5 Breakout Technologies for 2012

Telemedicine ranks 4th in the top five of the projected technologies to come into their own in the next handful of years. IBM brought 150,000 people from 104 countries together to pitch their prognostications. They narrowed the list down to five innovations that were the "most impactful, and probably the most likely to be successful" by 2012, said George Pohle, IBM's vice president for business consulting services (Source).

1. 
   

   "The 3-D Internet: Pohle said this technology is "about translating the user
   experience on the Internet from being almost a replication of a piece of paper -
   a Web 'page' - to almost a three-dimensional experience on the Internet."
   Basically, a virtual world a la Second Life, with open borders."

2. 
   

   "Mind-reading cell phones: In the next five years, cell phones may well have a
   mind of their own - integrating location information with a database of your
   surroundings. If you're on the road at dinnertime, your phone could let you know
   where the nearest pizza place is, and what's on special...You could also point
   your camera phone at a nearby landmark, snap a picture, and have the network
   tell you everything it knows about what you're seeing.

3. Nanotechnology for energy and the environment: "Over 2 billion people live
   without reliable water sources," Pohle said. "More people die from issues
   related to the lack of water than from any other cause." As a spin-off of its
   work with carbon nanotubes for electronics, IBM is looking into developing filters woven from nanotubes that could remove the salt and
   impurities out of salt water, at a lower cost than current desalination
   technologies.

4. Telemedicine: I am inferring that telemedicine as an umbrella term will continue to be
more and more inclusive of mental health. Once MDs use internet as mainstream
practice, mental health should be barking at their heels, especially since
insurance companies have to cover both types of health care visits (Halsey). " "Because many people now have Internet or even broadband connections, you can
start using those communication platforms, free or very cheaply, to connect
to
your doctor's office," Pohle said. Imagine having a setup at home that
can beam your vital
signs directly to the doctor's office, or alert a health-care provider if
something goes wrong. Patient information could be contained on an
RFID-equipped
bracelet - in fact, such bracelets have been in use for years already. Meanwhile, care providers in
remote areas could use a "Doc in a Box" to transmit medical images and data to
specialists thousands of miles away for instant review."
The scenario may
sound like something from George Orwell's "1984" rather than IBM's 2010 - but
Pohle said technological shortcuts could actually create "a higher quality of
interaction between the doctor and the patient."

5. Real Time Speech Translation: This technology too will be able to pave the way for more accurate, timely and convenient mental health services via the internet (Halsey).

"This field is already a hot one, and over the next five years,
IBM predicts
that translators will be popping up in mobile phones, handheld
devices and
automobiles. "These services will pervade every part of business
and
society,
eliminating the language barrier in the global economy and
social
interaction,"
the company said."

For More Info Link to Cosmic Blog MSNBC