Evolution of medical care in the digital world

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - What is technology's impact on your health and what are all the ways it helps you live better and even longer? Technology has become something we can't live without. Now more than ever it is saving lives, too. In the field of medicine, the tech industry is aiming to eliminate diseases and bring more robotics into the operating room.

"We can now get to the back of the throat and take out cancers," said Dr. Eric Genden, the co-chair of the Mount Sinai Robotics Institute. "We can do it in a fraction of the time than we can do it with conventional therapy."

He said that robotics have had a massive effect on things like head and neck cancer and prostate cancer, allowing doctors to access to parts of the body using less-invasive techniques. But in thyroid cancer, robotics has had less of an effect on patient care. He said the question of cost-effectiveness needs to be asked.

"What's the impact on care? How much are we really impacting the cost of care? And is there a benefit, a health benefit, for our patients?" Genden said. He added that very little of that research is conducted today. But as technology and medicine continue to build the relationship, that research needs to be done.

"For a long time technology was always on the outside, how we interact with a phone or a television, and now it's starting to go internal and wearable and potentially become part of us," said Lance Ulanoff, Mashable's chief correspondent.

He said that changes will be constant in the coming years. Some examples include Apple's research to develop a glucose tracker for diabetics, Google's work on implants for the eyes, and Mark Zuckerberg's donation of hundreds of millions of dollars to try to cure disease.

"There's no end in sight, and there shouldn't be because technology can solve a lot of problems," Ulanoff said.