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Today's hospitals are using communications technology to send digitized images of everything from broken bones to brains from one medical facility to the next. Even medevac units at remote accident locations can send images and data back to base hospitals so that emergency-room teams know exactly what they are dealing with when the patient arrives. Although teleradiology has been around for a decade or so, only now is it moving into the mainstream of medical care, thanks to lower-cost computers, significantly improved clarity of video images and improvements in networking and telecommunications. Many surgeons routinely use sophisticated computer-driven probes and TV imagery to help them in their diagnoses and operations. All this and more already exists. With a little tweak of the technology here or an imaginative pairing with other technologies there, computer-based devices are likely to affect our lives even more frequently in the months -- as well as in the years -- ahead.
Digital display screens visible above highways, warning of icy bridges ahead and detours, will become even more ubiquitous and varied. So will the long- awaited telescreen for seeing and being seen by those you talk with on the telephone. Carl Ledbetter, president of AT&T's Consumer Products division, predicts that ``in a decade, every phone will have a screen on it.'' At Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California, where the PC, on-screen icons and the laser printer originated, Mark Weiser, manager of the computer science laboratory, envisions a world in which flat-panel screens bearing a multitude of images will be household regulars. They will range from tiny ones, costing perhaps $5 each and plastered everywhere, to wall-size ones for viewing video. The smaller ones, says Weiser, are ``where you'll plan your grocery list or do your homework. They'll be the equivalent of Post-it notes on the refrigerator or the crumpled-up notepaper in your pocket.''
In Weiser's world, people will wake up to a tiny bedside screen that gives the time and the weather forecast and even displays news headlines or sports scores. Pocket-size screens would also serve as remote controls for larger screens in the bedroom or living room, where family members will use them variously to watch TV, read the newspaper (which will be customized for each member's personal interests) or draw up the family grocery list.
To get themselves through the day, people will carry pocket-size Personal Assistants, called smart badges or smart cards, encoded with basic information that uniquely identifies them. Simple versions of such devices would allow their carriers to walk through security checkpoints -- a concept already being tested in a section of the Paris Metro, where commuters need never remove the card from their pockets.