Hey guys! It's week 6 already, 6 weeks into Uni life and things are getting more and more hectic with mid term exam coming soon,tons of projects to do, and assignments to hand up. Ok I shall be prepared for this heavy workload in uni and just try my best and tackle it and do well in it. This week of TWC, we looked into Biobusiness. This area of technology seems foreign and complicated to me at first but it is in fact a 'big thing' in the technology field. It constitutes over 25% of global GDP and employ some 40% of the world labour force (and this is in 2001, ten yrs ago) Biobusiness just means commercial activity based on an understanding of life sciences and life science processes. Biobusiness is used in many industry sectors like the biomedical sector where u have healthcare, herbal traditional medicine where I'll talk more about it and we had a presentation on it too. There's also the food industry, environmental and industrial biobusiness and other biobusiness like nanotechnology. This week will concentrate mainly on biobusiness in healthcare. What struck me most is when prof talks about the US healthcare and he quoted that more than 70% of healthcare spending goes to the last 1 year of the people life. He even showed us an interesting video called "Sicko" where it talks all about US healthcare and how atrocious the system is. I remember watching it before last time and till now I still remember this part of it. They talk about how expensive it is to get healthcare services in US and some people even have to migrate to Canada to get their healthcare services which is much cheaper than in US. Despite the advancement of healthcare in the biobusiness industry, I feel that what is the point of this when the government and the companies are controlling the industry and making it unaffordable for people to use it. There may be lots of arguements for this, like companies need the money for their R&D so they cant sell it at a low cost. I feel that we need to work on improving the healthcare system in countries, making it affordable for people. One of the readings talk about disease management where the elderly people get involved in technology to help keep their doctors informed of their medical status and from this, they can get constant help from the doctors. Things like this is very good to improve the healthcare level in the country and countries should go towards this system. In one of the presentation, we talked about Singapore going towards such management system. I shall go into the presentations next.
This week, we had 5 presentations and they were all really good as usual, making me feel the stress and pressure because I still haven't presented. Dont worry guys, I'll try my best not to disappoint the class and definitely give it my best shot for the presentation. Priya started off presenting on the future of Singapore healthcare. I believe like Singapore, many developed countries face the problem of ageing population and this problem must be tackled before it gets too late. In her article, it talks about using technology to help solve this problem just like the disease mangement system. I believe this is possible but only if the user interface for such devices are very simple and legible to read. For example, my dad will only use phones which has easy to read interface like the iphones. When u make a call, the keypad is very legible and easy to read. Although the msging keypad seems a little small for him to read, no wonder my dad dont really use sms. Next, Jethro talks about a very interesting topic of immortality. To be honest, I find his presentation abit dull and boring however his discussion questions brightens up the class. To answer his question, in my opinion, I feel that there are many considerations for being immortal, it is very hard for me to decide on this matter. If u're immortal, you can have all the time in the world and do many many things. However, one may feel since u have so much time in ur life, life will get bored and everyday u'll just be doing nothing and wasting your time and life away.I think at this moment, I'll lean towards living my life as it is right now. The last presentation, Surbashene talks about herbal medicine and traditional medicine. To be honest, as a Chinese myself and also based on my personal experience, I have more faith in such chinese traditional medicine which may not have much medical support. I remembered I tore my calf muscle when I was serving the army. I was brought to the western way of treating it which is to do physiotherapy. After doing for sometime, I realised that the recovery is very slow and I'm getting really impatient. So, I turned to chinese medicine, I went for accupunture, massage, and chinese medicine. In the end, I recovered much faster and now Im up and running all thanks to chinese traditional medicine. I still remembered after the first session of treatment, I can already feel a great improvement in my leg and I thought to myself what a great miracle. Seriously...
Personal rating: 9/10
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