You wake up one morning with what feels like a jackhammer inside your skull.
Your throat is raw from coughing and your nose is so stuffed that you reminisce about the days when you were a member of the Five Senses Club. Hidden among the pile of scrunched up Kleenex is your phone, but after a few thumb taps, the heart palpitations that WebMD has given you make your snotty nose seem almost pleasant.
2022 is here and with it comes all of the potential promise that a new year brings. As the hours of daylight lengthen (at least, for those of us here in the Northern hemisphere), motivation to burn off the excesses of the holidays, and leave behind 2021’s baggage, is high – or is it?
2022 is already making a name for itself in the world of innovation, with a number of attention-grabbing digital health products debuting at the Consumer Electronics 2022 show earlier this month.
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that integrates interactive virtual content with the physical real world, such as in the form of a digital three-dimensional visual (3D) representation, thereby augmenting the perception of reality. Typically, virtual content is projected into the physical environment through the use of smart glasses, a headset or mobile/tablet device (1, 2, 3). AR is one of the most exciting technological advances in medicine and healthcare in recent times, with many novel applications being developed for use in improving patient outcomes.
Once again, it’s that time of year. The sun has gone on its winter vacation, temperatures have dropped, and the sky is stained with an anything-but-cheerful shade of grey. With such serotonin-depleting changes to our environment, it’s no wonder that many of us feel less than chirpy in the winter months.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, if you’d asked people to list what they define as ‘critical’ healthcare workers, pharmacists most likely wouldn’t have made the cut despite being the third-largest group of healthcare professionals worldwide.
Are the robots going to save us all?
In previous blogs I’ve been in awe of the amazing pizza making robots of Paris, but now the robots are getting serious – the Cobi robot, for example, is aiming to vaccinate the world!
This time last year we were reflecting on the light at the end of the tunnel, with a vaccine being rolled out that would help fight COVID-19. The global situation has certainly improved since then but, unfortunately, we aren’t quite out the other side just yet. 2021 repeatedly threw challenges our way and businesses were forced to continue to adapt and evolve in order to survive. As an online education provider we were in a very fortunate position, and we’ve successfully run hundreds of online meetings over the past 12 months.
As we enter the festive season, it’s time to get wrapping, cooking, and preparing yourself for the recurrent trial of explaining to your relatives what it is that you actually do for a living. If you’ve been working in account management for a while, chances are it won’t be the first year that you’ve had to politely explain that despite what Aunt Anne tells all her friends, you’re still, without a doubt, not an accountant.