Cutting edge medical research includes VR, laser, mobile apps

Everything from virtual reality and lasers to mobile apps are helping create new opportunities in the medical world - and some of those technologies were recently demonstrated at the Digital Health Summer Summit at the UCSF Medical Center.

UCSF wants to embrace possible disruptive technologies, such as a virtual reality tour of your own brain, or testing an app that mixes big data with 3D images. It will take significantly more time to work out possible bugs, but the use of mobile technologies, augmented reality and VR in the operating room in the past, so it will be a topic of discussion again in the future.

"We have people here on the front lines doing tremendously innovative things," said Dr. Aenor Sawyer, a UCSF Medical Center leader in digital health innovation, while speaking to attendees. "We hope to be part of the wave disrupting health care."

I'm most interested to see how medical researchers and tech experts utilize the large amount of information gathered by fitness trackers and wearables. It seems like we're just waiting for a killer app that convinces us to track data on our smartphones and wearables - but there aren't a lot of reasons to go through the trouble, many people complain.