The Six Million Dollar Man will soon be fact, not fiction

Washington

THE most significant announcement that Apple made in 2014 wasn't a larger size iPhone. It was that Apple is entering the healthcare industry. With HealthKit, it is building an iTunes-like platform for health - Apple Watch is its first medical device. Apple is, however, two steps behind Google, IBM and hundreds of start-ups. They realised much earlier that medicine is becoming an information technology and that the US$1 trillion healthcare market is ripe for disruption.

My prediction is that 2015 will be the year in which tech takes baby steps in transforming medicine. The technologies that make this possible are advancing at exponential rates; their power and performance are increasing dramatically even as their prices fall and footprints shrink. The big leaps will start to happen at around the end of this decade.