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Introduction
Emerging technologies catch the fancy of everyone. An emerging technology must have any of the five features so that it can be placed under the banner. The five features are coherence, prominent impact, relatively fast growth, novelty, uncertainty and ambiguity. These five features or characteristics place any new technology from the perspective of emerging technologies. Emerging technologies have been much debated in the academic as well as industry circles. Emerging technologies gather a lot of attention from analyst, practitioners and researchers. In the recent times, the last one decade has seen an emergence of innovation in almost every field, including healthcare, information technology, analytics, data storage, human-computer interface (HCI), interconnected devices and E-health (Rotolo & Martin, 2015).
The concept of emerging denotes a process of coming into being or under evaluation or coming into existence. The most applicable attribute for emerging is coming into existence; that is to say, an emerging technology is never static or stable, but it is under an evolutionary phase. The result of that evolution can either be an advanced level for that technology with mass acceptance or a downgrade and extinction for that technology. Existing literature on emerging technologies discusses continuous and radical innovations that are aimed at achieving a particular purpose or function. Some emerging technologies from the past that have gained acceptance are an internal combustion engine, molecular biology, quantum physics, and web 2.0 from the field of Information technology.
Emerging technologies have gained an increasing relevance in academic and industry for research, and innovation. Multiple policies are formed at government and academic levels for giving a direction to the field of emerging technologies. There have been government funded initiatives like FET (Future & Emerging Technologies) and FUSE (Foresight & understanding from the scientific exposition) (Rotolo & Martin, 2015).
The Internet of Things (IOT)
IOT is the most talked about emerging technology. It enables devices to communicate with each other. IOT devices are context-aware and ubiquitous enabling an intelligent ambience of the interactive device. The last few decades have witnessed evolutionary phases on the internet and World Wide Web (WWW). The emergence of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies has marked a new era in the field of semantic web. Alongside, the development in RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags, sensor networks have added to the evolution of the near field communication technologies. The convergence of Internet and sensor networks has created new possibilities and novel approaches. IOT can be considered a direct development of the amalgamation of technologies. The core concept of IOT rallies around the fact that everyday objects can be equipped to identify and sense networks and process information amongst themselves. The underlying network for this communication between devices is the internet. The core technology for this communication of the devices is RFID tags and the sensor networks. The idea of machine communication is not new and has been in place for a long time at industrial scale. What IOT represents is the evolution of these communication technologies to everyday devices. The devices that can be connected could be home appliances, audio-video receivers, smoke detectors, home and office equipment, vehicles and other devices. Each of the devices would then send its status and messages to an online server. Thereby, each of the devices is directly accessible from the internet. IOT finds major application in smart infrastructure, social applications, supply chain logistics and healthcare. However, it also poses great challenges for security and privacy (Whitmore, Agarwal & Da Xu, 2015).
Big Data Analytics Trends
Big Data represents the availability and presence of data in huge volumes. Big data consists of both structured and unstructured data. Big data is the evolution of data processing capabilities for complex and large data sets usually consisting of text, documents, images and multimedia. The challenges for big data include capture, analysis, storage, search, querying and visualization of data. The advent of technology and increase in data storage capabilities has directly impacted the evolution of Big Data and its supporting technologies. The emerging technology of cloud computing with its virtualized servers, distributed data centers and large data repositories provide high capabilities for analytics and parallel computing. The evolution of high availability data storage mechanism and evolution of hardware capabilities has strongly impacted the Big Data Analytics emergence. Applications for large-scale data analytics are becoming of much importance in the fields of healthcare, social networks, logistics and biomedical researchers. Big data analytics has created a large number of jobs for what are known as data scientists. Big data has boosted the evolution of new computing technologies like Hadoop, No SQL databases and use and application of statistical programming languages like ‘R’. Data, storage vendors like SAP and Microsoft, have come up with evolutionary database storage products that support large data warehouses; provide high availability environments and data analytics of large datasets. Big Data Analytics has given precedence to trends in virtualization design, data-centers-on-chip (DoC) architectures and improved software stacks (Kambatla, Kollias & Grama, 2014).
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has emerged as the most accepted and evolved form in the field of Information technology. The basic premise of cloud computing is a high available environment. Cloud computing provides resources on demand with pay per use capabilities. It allows scaling of infrastructure according to the actual demand. The models of Cloud Computing include PaaS (Platform as a service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), SaaS (Software as a service), BPaaS (Business process as a service), DBaaS (Database as a service). Cloud can be delivered as a public, private community or a hybrid model with each of the type having distinct capabilities. Cloud Computing is a direct result of the capabilities of virtualization. Virtualization enables to run multiple servers on minimal physical hardware device thereby reducing the cost and operations of data servers. The technology of virtualization is provided as API (Application Programming Interface) under the IaaS model. PaaS model provides software development capabilities while SaaS is the oldest version of software delivery where software process is delivered as a service. The oldest example includes E-mail clients such as Gmail and Hotmail (Assunção et al., 2015).
Innovations in E-health
E-health as an emerging technology promises innovations in the field of healthcare for improving the efficiency and quality of care, better clinical decision, making and adopting healthy behavior. E-health as an emerging trend is a collection and reference of the adoption of new technologies in healthcare. The employment of technologies has been for diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other highly critical diseases. The collections of the patient report through integrated web-based system, empowering individuals with chronic illnesses, in managing their health and universal access to E-health technologies is all part of the healthcare emerging trends. E-health improves the quality of care for patients, satisfaction with the quality of healthcare settings, and better outcomes for patients’ health record. E-health supports self-management by patients, sharing of clinical information and treatment goals with patients. E-health opens new avenues for patient care enabling the patients through online networks to monitor, compare and view their treatment and diagnosis for the ongoing care (Wicks et al., 2014).
Trends in Health Technologies
Human-Computer Interface (HCI) has seen a lot of changes due to the consequences of the evolution of pervasive healthcare technologies. The changes have been evident in the design of HCI equipment. The technological progress, evolution of hardware and software has brought about new possibilities and innovation in medical services, delivery and devices. The evolution has also been marked by the requirement of users who are aware emerging technologies. The pervasive technologies continue to impact and change the scale of HCI. Emerging technologies like IOT has impacted HCI directly by creating intelligent objects and smart environments. In the world of mobile services and the technological innovations of cloud computing HCI has seen major changes. Biomedical sciences have been impacted by data-intensive researchers where HCI equipment have a great contribution to the collection of data for what is known as Big Data in biomedical (Röcker, Ziefle & Holzinger, 2014).
Summary and conclusion
Emerging technologies are now in each and every field and has been impacted by the availability and exposure of information. The most impacted field in innovation is that of information technology (IT) with emerging trends in cloud computing, big data analytics and IoT. The evolution of IT impacts each and every field including healthcare, sales, logistics, education and human computer interaction.
Reference
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