9 Weird Predictions About The Future Of Healthcare
Will you smell the robot in the room? Will surgeons become helpless without robots and AI? Do you need to think about weird questions like these?
Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD
10 min | 25 March 2025
Key Takeaways
The future often appears heavily driven by technology, but we must always consider how we, humans will feel living in that era.
It might seem amusing, but pondering quirky scenarios like smelly-armpit robots can actually bring us closer to the most desirable tomorrow (and day after tomorrow).
Let’s explore why it’s worthwhile to sometimes reflect on weird scenarios from the times spanning ahead of us!
Will you smell the robot in the room? Might documentaries explore the situation of bioprinted human organ transplantations on the black market? Will virtual reality cause a worldwide obesity epidemic?
At The Medical Futurist, we spend our days with cutting-edge healthcare technologies, dissecting the latest breakthroughs and mapping out the potential futures they could create. Although our work may seem to be strongly tech-focused, we, in fact, think about the human element. We always consider not just what the future might hold, but how it will feel to live in it. Because in the end, it is the human experience, not just the technology itself, that will define the true impact of these innovations.
My job is to map out current technological trends, to distill the overall paradigm frame in which we are thinking about medicine and healthcare; and based on data, analytics and carefully weighed subjective opinions, to set up potential pathways forward.
Medical mind games and weird ideas
My method as The Medical Futurist is to set up potential pathways regarding extremities. What is the best and worst outcome we might have within a hundred years? Will we live in a Black Mirror or Westworld-like dystopic society or will our environment enable us to live the Aristotelian ‘good life’? Sometimes my contemplations result in short-term trendsetting analyses, sometimes in sci-fi stories – and sometimes weird ideas. Here, I’d like to present the weirdest ideas I got during my futurist mind games.
Let’s explore some of the more peculiar and unexpected questions about the future of medicine. Looking at these seemingly bizarre scenarios lets us reflect on the often-overlooked human side of technological evolution.
1) Will robots have a distinctive smell?
The future of healthcare will be filled with robots: TUG-like mechanic structures will carry around medication and equipment in hospitals, Pepper-like humanoid creatures or Atlas-like robo-athletes will greet patients at hospital receptions or act like human companions. Robots are made up of many components resulting in a distinctive machine smell: plastic, metal, oil, and various unique parts. I can already smell the robot in the room.
I was even contemplating about how to solve the robot smell trouble, and I figured out where the answer could come from – Japan. The tech-savvy nation already had a robotic response to stinky feet and bad breath a decade ago. I’m sure they will be the first to come up with a neutral-smelling robot.
2) Will the lack of Bluetooth cause an emergency?
Ted was sipping his latte macchiato in a café on a piazza in downtown Palermo. The sun was shining bright, and the place was buzzing with chitchat. Suddenly, a street vendor from Morocco offering fridge magnets, postcards and umbrellas collapsed. Ted was close to the man, so he rushed to him and took a portable diagnostic tricorder device similar to the MedWand, or Viatom Checkme. He was eager to examine the man’s heart rate, pulse, and ECG, but his pocket-gadget didn’t have a screen, so the data had to be sent to his phone. And the Bluetooth connection didn’t work! The smartphone couldn’t find the damn gadget! How could that happen in 2078? Ted thought we had already solved this issue back in the 2010s.
I can easily imagine a similar situation. Digital health device developers should take into account the power of (dis)connectivity and minimise the points where Bluetooth, WLAN, Wi-Fi or anything else could have an impact on whether or not a MedTech gadget works.
3) Can you eat without using technologies?
In 2086, Shiko, the poshest restaurant in downtown Tokyo offered a special night to its guests: they could eat without smart forks and smart chopsticks, without food sensors and dietary chatbots, even without social media. What a bold idea!
Nothing to test food for gluten, peanuts, or other allergens. No chance to see what your food contains. You cannot use dietary chatbots to tell you what to choose from the menu and how to combine them so you can remain within your daily calorie target. You cannot even use social media to share your culinary experience with friends and relatives. Can you imagine that?
The only exemption from the rule is the use of nutrigenomics since you cannot leave out of sight the results of your DNA test and the particular nutritional recommendations you already learned. No other excuse is accepted! Will people take the challenge? Eating like barbarians at the turn of the 21st century?
4) Will surgeons learn to use the scalpel in the age of robots?
Virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, and artificial Intelligence-supported surgical robots support surgeons in the OR. In the next decades, it might become natural to have surgical robots, such as the da Vinci Surgical System. According to current market analysis, the industry is about to boom. By 2035, surgical robotics sales are expected to grow to over $30 billion.
So, what if surgical robots will be present in every OR soon? What if digital technologies could become such an intensive part of a surgeon’s work that they might feel weaker and more insecure without them?
5) Will virtual reality cause an obesity epidemic?
Virtual reality will become an excellent tool for making healthcare more pleasant in the future, as it can make the healthcare journey for patients more agreeable: through providing an entirely immersive experience, it alleviates all kinds of pain, dissipates fear, offers more empathy and better care.
However, what if affordable VR devices offering immersive experiences way better than reality might lead to an addiction wave in the future – just as in the case of online gaming? Although there is no scientific evidence for VR having any side effects in a low dose, there are already works of fiction depicting scenes where excessive usage and careless humans might be taken by technology. The dilemma of living on/offline and its possible, utopian consequences are shown brutally for example in the sci-fi short, Uncanny Valley. In addition, the Disney cartoon, Wall-E, shows what happens to “fitless humans” hooked on VR.
6) Will we have to learn how to make conversations?
Do you consider it slightly rude if someone calls you on your cell phone? Out of the blue? Did you notice that you rather send an e-mail first if you want to call someone who is not your mom or wife just to be sure they will take it? Did you notice that family members are sending each other emojis about dinner being ready from the next room instead of calling out? When did it happen to us that we started to choose the written word over the spoken one – the planned, erasable and choreographed reality instead of the spontaneous back-and-forth?
Imagine what we might have in the future with Babel fish earpods translating in real time between any languages or AR contact lenses that project additional information about the world. Will we ever need to talk to other people with large language models at our fingertips? After all, generative AI chatbots can easily draft everything we want to communicate in safe, neutral ways.
In her marvelous book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk In A Digital Age, Sherry Turkle argues that face-to-face conversation could bring back empathy to our lives, which we let regress and blame on technology. In the future, we might have digital-free spaces where people could practice having face-to-face conversations. Does it creep you out? Do something against this grim possibility! Read the book and talk to people, not only message them.
7) Will bioprinted human organ transplants take place on the black market?
Researchers at Boston University used 3D printing technology to develop a miniature replica of a human heart – one that beats on its own. The device was created using a combination of stem cell-derived human heart cells and micro-scale 3D printed acrylic parts, and it doesn’t rely on external power source, it beats on its own. Researchers hope it can be used to track how the heart grows in an embryo, how heart tissue is affected by diseases, and how effective new medications are in treating said diseases, all without the need for human testing.
Organ shortages are a problem all over the world, with millions of people waiting for a good match. In the long run, bioprinting will surely be the solution, substituting the missing donors. It might easily become a future scenario that the first transplantation of a bioprinted human organ might take place through the black market as no ethical bureau will be brave or prepared enough to supervise it.
8) Will we edit genes with CRISPR at home?
In 2017, biohacker Josiah Zayner gave a lecture in San Francisco in which he claimed to be the first person known to have edited his DNA using the CRISPR/Cas-9 technology. He insists it is something anyone can do using one of his company’s gene engineering kits. Does it sound scary and far from safe? Yes, it does. As a geneticist, do you ask whether I recommend the technology to anyone? No, I don’t.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future people wanted to modify themselves genetically at home. As the possibility of ordering a DIY CRISPR set for home is already a reality, I would not be surprised to hear about emergency situations connected to CRISPR in the future.
9) Will completely healthy humans ask for technological body extensions?
In the future, brain implants could improve our memory. Implanted magnets or RFID chips implanted in our fingers could replace passwords and keys. Exoskeletons could boost our strength, and augment a whole range of our human capabilities.
As technological innovations in the field of medicine and healthcare multiply day by day, it will be more and more usual to augment our bodies with the help of machines. It makes us faster, stronger or more sensitive to the environment. I’m convinced the time will come when the first transhumanist will ask a team of doctors to replace a conventional arm with a robotic one as it is much better than the original one. How would the medical community react to that?
Did I miss something? What are the weirdest notions you imagine about the future of healthcare? Do you see them so scary that we should discuss how to avoid them or do you imagine them as embodiments of another era – now they might be weird, but somehow they will naturally fit the futuristic environment? Let me know what you think on The Medical Futurist’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn channel!
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