This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. By the time Tara returned from the protest, SafeT gauged her Wellness at 60% and Chase felt sick. For the last two hours he'd watched the number on his phone's app tick down, from safe green to warning yellow: 87%, 74%, 60%. On his newsfeed, masked chanters waved signs before the wire cage shielding the five megapipes that breached the marshy shore of Lake Michigan. Each pipe was owned by a consortium of Lakes United companies. Their great steel veins wormed the city, bearing water from LU to the drought-scarred West and South, whose nations paid more per acre-foot than Milwaukee's citizens ever could. On the feed Chase hadn't been able to see Tara or the sign she'd painted that morning: Our Lake, Our Water. What he had seen were the security corps of at least three consortia, clumped beneath their ever-circling camera-drones, bull-horning the chanters that they were risking corporate slander. If arrested, they'd be hauled off to one of the consortia's private prisons. There they could be coerced into confessing they were linebreakers, guerillas who spliced pipes to siphon off clean water to Milwaukee neighborhoods that couldn't afford consortia prices. Protestors sometimes returned from these prisons. Fingers numb, Chase had tapped SafeT to view the breakdown of Tara's Wellness aggregate into its individual components: risk of arrest (15%), risk of indictment (20%), risk of job loss (27%), risk of injury (31%). Even when she had texted home in 30 and he'd cleared her route in the SafeT map--low smoke risk, low contagion risk, 93% chance of safe arrival--his jaw only eased when she stepped through the door. Tara's thin face was ferocious, cheeks red against her yellow hair. Black grease spotted her strong hands. Over the decade they'd shared, he'd watched age sharpen her into herself. Now, impassioned, she was fiercely beautiful. He almost forgot her yellow number, until she saw him, and her smile sagged.

Background: The dementia epidemic is progressing fast. As the world's older population keeps skyrocketing, the traditional incompetent, time-consuming, and laborious interventions are becoming increasingly insufficient to address dementia patients' health care needs. This is particularly true amid COVID-19. Instead, efficient, cost-effective, and technology-based strategies, such as sixth-generation communication solutions (6G) and artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered health solutions, might be the key to successfully managing the dementia epidemic until a cure becomes available. However, while 6G and AI technologies hold great promise, no research has examined how 6G and AI applications can effectively and efficiently address dementia patients' health care needs and improve their quality of life.

Last week, we published the first two of our ten predictions in our report, 'The future unmasked: Predicting the future of healthcare and life sciences in 2025'. This week, we launch predictions three and four, 'Clinicians are empowered by new diagnostic and treatment paradigms' and'The who, what and where of work re-architected'. This week's blog provides an overview of predictions three and four. How COVID-19 is changing healthcare professional's ways of working In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers reorganised their staff and services and provided bespoke training to enable new ways of working. They also introduced new levels of physical and mental health and wellbeing support their staff all while attempting to deliver safe care to patients.

In any given year, 1 in 5 employed US adults experience a mental health issue like depression, anxiety, and insomnia. COVID19 has pushed the world into an uncharted territory as it has proved to be a perfect storm of stressors -- Right from job loss, economic instability, home schooling, food & health insecurity to the uncertainty of when (or even if) life will return to normal. A simple example -- 33 million jobs lost as of May 7, 2020 – huge financial stress, lock down multiplied domestic violence etc. In just a few months, Covid19 has just doubled the stat of the population affected mentally. Hence, mental health needs urgent addressing and some cool innovative technology solutions are coming to the rescue.

This week, we have launched the first in a series of reports on artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential impact in driving the digital transformation of biopharma. This overview report, Intelligent biopharma: Forging the links across the value chain, explores the challenges and opportunities in AI adoption and the potential ways that AI might impact the different segments of the biopharma value chain (see Figure 1).1 The pace and scale of medical and scientific innovation, together with increasing competition, lengthening R&D cycle times, shorter time in market, expiring patents, declining peak sales, pressure around reimbursement and mounting regulatory scrutiny are challenging the existing biopharma business and operating models. These challenges have also had a massively negative impact on the expected return on investment that large biopharma companies expect to achieve from their late-stage pipelines. Consequently, companies are looking to digital transformation as a key differentiator and essential part of their change management strategy. AI technologies are some of the most anticipated of these digital technologies.

The health system is prone to cyber-attacks and other forms of cyber mischief just like any other industry so, naturally, leaders in the health industry are doing whatever they can to adequately respond to all the challenges put before them.With that in mind, we can safely say that they are looking for a new opportunity with each coming year as modern technology advances rapidly. With Google, Amazon, and Apple finding their way into healthcare, these leaders are expressing some optimism about future healthcare tech such as telehealth services but still have to invest to defend against cyber-attacks. According to a recent survey, telehealth and cybersecurity are among three top areas of health IT for 2019 as these IT technologies, along with artificial intelligence,machine learning, and the rise of chatbots will have the most impact on healthcare in the years to come. Digital health solutions will continue to go far beyond the traditional healthcare system, especially in 2019, and these solutions will significantly empower individuals to better care and manage their own health. It's expected that digital health spendings will cross $25 billion globally by the end of the next year.

The market has been driving itself into a frenzy this past year with the potential for emerging technologies to influence the digital transformation of healthcare to a value-based care era. Every year, a new term becomes the buzzword around which the entire technology industry rallies to make its case and rise above the noise. This year, it's been AI, and technology vendors have fallen over one another to demonstrate how their solutions are "AI-powered," "AI-enabled" or "AI-led." The indiscriminate use of the term "AI" has become so pervasive that the research firm Gartner has even invented a name for it: AI-washing. Arguably, many technology solution providers in the digital health space are simply slapping an AI label onto their offerings in hopes that healthcare executives will be interested.

Cognitive Computing in its essence is tremendously creative, it helps us to find complex correlations, and lets us see things that could not be seen with an average human eye. What once was science fiction, is now reality. And that's why I want to share a couple of practical examples, how life sciences companies have applied cognitive services and artificial intelligence to transform their businesses and ultimately provide better, innovative products, invent new business models, provide personalized, customer-centric services and optimized their operations. This first example with Dartmouth Hitchcock shows how to get closer to the vision of ever more individualized healthcare: ImagineCare is a highly coordinated, intensely personalized solution for chronic diseases. This cloud-based system enables nurses and health coaches track and respond to an individual's health status in real time.