© Forward
It's a scene that seems straight out of a science fiction film. You enter alone into a cube measuring 2.5 meters by 2.5 meters. Then all you need is a few taps on a screen to have a battery of medical examinations carried out: blood pressure, blood and heart tests, or even examination of a mole or a spot. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, partner doctors write a prescription based on the results obtained.
A disruptive innovation
This story will soon become reality thanks to Forward, an American startup which will deploy its automated medical cabins in several large American cities, including New York and Chicago. These will be installed in shopping centers or office buildings. Investors strongly believe in this project, and the company recently raised $100 million to develop this concept called CarePods.
Among the people who have long trusted Forward, we find big names from Silicon Valley including Eric Schmidt, the former boss of Google, and Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.
At the helm of this company, we have Adrian Aoun, a former Google employee, who embarked on this adventure seven years ago, reports Fortune. Previously, this company only offered private clinics that allow patients to perform a full body scan.
Forward has already set the price of its new service. Thus, future customers will have to pay $100 per month to access these small medical cabins. Boosted with AI, they are not supposed to replace the human doctor. It is therefore a simple diagnostic tool which does not prescribe any treatment.
Quoted by our colleagues from Techcrunch, Adrian Aoun offers a metaphor to summarize his project: “Elon Musk started with the Model S, which led to the Model 3. Our Model S was a high-tech medical office in San Francisco, and we expanded it to 20-25 cities. But a high-tech medical practice will never be able to extend to the entire planet.
Still, his speech should not reassure everyone. world, as he adds: Basically what I'm doing is slowly migrating everything from a doctor and a nurse to hardware and software . We don't even think a doctor's office should exist. We think this is a thing of the past”.
What do you think of this innovation? Feel free to give your point of view in the comments.
[ ]