The impact of light based technologies in the future of healthcare

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in light-based technologies offering cheap, fast and noninvasive disease detection and treatment. In 2016, the market of light-based technologies represented >64% of the total medical imaging market ($90.7 billion in total) and more than twice the radiological imaging market that included X-Ray, ultrasound, magnetic resonant imaging and others. Light-based technologies have steadily increased with the mobile and home healthcare, as well as wearable devices dominating the market to monitor quality of sleep, sports performance, and blood oxygenation in general (including COVID-19 cases). Given the importance of light in the future of healthcare, this paper covers how light-based technologies are used to find diseases early (screening) and accurately (diagnostics) in both whole body (systemically with screening tests) or localized parts of the body (during surgery).