Digital technologies is a major emerging area to invest and research in new models of health management. Future health scenarios are constituted by technologies in health and clinical decision-making systems. This book provides a unique multidisciplinary approach for exploring the potential contribution of AI and digital technologies in enabling global healthcare systems to respond to urgent twenty-first-century challenges. Deep analysis has been made regarding telemedicine using big data, deep learning, robotics, mobile and remote applications. Features: Focuses on prospective scenarios in health to predict possible futures. Addresses the urgent needs of the key population, socio-technical and health themes. Covers health innovative practices as 3D models for surgeries, big data to treat rare diseases, and AI robot for heart treatments. Explores telemedicine using big data, deep learning, robotics, mobile and remote applications. Reviews public health based on predictive analytics and disease trends. This book is aimed at researchers, professionals, and graduate students in computer science, artificial intelligence, decision support, healthcare technology management, biomedical engineering, and robotics.

How can the public health system best be organised in the future and which factors are the main determinants thereof? These are key questions in the scenario report The Future of Public Health: a Scenario Study. The report is the result of a study commissioned by the Steering Committee on Future Health Scenarios and carried out by a research team of the TNO Institute of Preventive Health Care and the STG Scenario Committee on the Future of Public Health. The report focuses on activities in collective prevention of diseases, generally known as primary prevention. The future images developed make use of two examples, the control of infectious diseases and public health for the elderly. In designing those scenarios, two sets of possible trends were combined: centralisation versus decentralisation and nationalisation versus privatisation. These combinations resulted in three scenarios; a local government scenario, a central government scenario, and a private enterprise scenario. The consequences of these future alternatives were developed in terms of their effect on organisation, policy control, financing, information supply, expertise and effectiveness. Although the report primarily focuses on the public health system in the Netherlands, the analysis of the processes examined, and the alternative scenarios based on them are also thought-provoking for readers throughout the world.

In Future Scenarios, permaculture co-originator and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of “energy descent” that faces us. “Scenario planning,” Holmgren explains, “allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail, or be transformed.” Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probable futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign Green Tech scenario to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario. As Adam Grubb, founder of the influential Energy Bulletin website, says, “These aren’t two-dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed-out visions of quite plausible alternative futures, which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, social, and even spiritual trends. What they do help make clear are the best strategies for preparing for and adapting to these possible futures.” Future Scenarios provides brilliant and balanced consideration of the world’s options and will prove to be one of the most important books of the year.