MedTech Fever 2022

The MedTech Fever is coming, and significant opportunities are right around the corner.

In a market expected to be worth $36 billion by 2025, the availability and supply of big data and the demand to reduce healthcare costs will drive the growth of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare market to levels never seen before. According to most business analysts, the ML and NLP technology will hold the largest market share for services inside the Artificial Intelligence healthcare market.

With the rise of Covid-19, increase pressure from corporations to grow the bottom-line and additional stress at the workplace than in the previous generation, and more mental health issues than ever, the loss for the global economy will never be less than $16 trillion during this decade.

Currently, we are losing $1 trillion from lack of productivity in workplaces every year, and almost 800 million people are suffering from some form of depression, anxiety, or work-related stress.

The current picture

Assisted Therapy is one of the new and still very unexplored markets in the MedTech world. While most companies like Headspace, 7Cups, TalkSpace, Sanvelo focus on the traditional model of middle man platform connecting professionals from either self-therapy or standard therapy, a few small players in the market like Wysa, Replika, and Youper are betting on AI-Assisted Therapy; still, the quality of their AI engines is not much more than a chatBot.

3rd generation AI!

The world needs a 3rd generation AI technology to build a Contextual and Behavioural AI agent that is more complex than a chatbox to understand the nature of the conversation, emotions, old references, and intentions in order to provide a natural dialog with the patients.

What Now?

I have always been fascinated by the movie 'Her' with Joaquin Phoenix, where an introverted writer buys an Artificial Intelligence system to help him write. However, when he finds out about the AI's ability to learn and adapt, he falls in love with it, and I always wonder why have we not created this technology to battle mental health issues? 

We have the technology with adaptative AI engines like OpenAI and DeepMind and Rasa frameworks. We have enough healthcare experts and understanding of the human mind to create, test, and validate AI models that can be personalized to each individual.

The NLU and NLP talent have never been higher; the interest and passion for tackling this world problem also increased and kept growing in the last years due to economic opportunities. The natural next step would be the growth of localizing platforms to address cultural and language differences.

Why Not?

But Capital is vital and expensive; the current VC investment has stagnated since Covid-19 rise, and with little perspective to increase in 2021, we will have to wait for 2022 to see a new business in the industry using AI capabilities to tackle world problems like this one.

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