Technology, Society, and Generational Interoperability—An Incredible July 2024

When I was studying at UCLA, I still remember my first handheld calculator, the one that helped me accelerate my chemistry lab results. At the end of 1978, when I joined IBM, I learned and used for the first time ever IBM’s internal company communications network and email. This was a life-changing shift. I wrote from Los Angeles with queries to IBM Scientific Centers in Paris, Rome, Pisa, Haifa, Madrid, London, and Heidelberg, and within hours, I got their responses. Twenty years later while at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the use of geographical information systems (GISs) for epidemiology and surveillance was an incredible “discovery” as well. Around 1980, I was also part of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). Besides myself, there were only two other colleagues who had any type of connection between the biomedical engineering (BME) field and information technology/computers. One was Swamy Laxminarayan (at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who later became the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions ON InFormation Technology) and Nitish Thakor (at Johns Hopkins working on neural networks). Today, we cannot separate any portion of any field in medicine (or any other profession) from the use of information technology and computers. From 1979, I worked in the area of Computers in Medicine (Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Informatics Sections in the four editions of Joseph Bronzino’s Handbook of BME.). I developed the first six healthcare applications to run on an IBM PC, and these were presented in January 1982 at the High-Risk Patient Conference at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in LA. In September 2024, the topic of SSIT’s flagship conference (the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) 2024) is the “Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI).” Yet 39 years ago (in September 1985), as an invited speaker, I gave the talk “AI in Biomedicine” in Valencia, Spain. During the 9th annual IEEE-EMBS Conference, in November 1987, I chaired “Artificial Intelligence in Medicine,” in Boston, MA, USA, and in 2002, I developed and taught the “AI in Public Health” course for the “new” career in Public Health Informatics, at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.

On 10 July 2024, I flew with my daughter Julia to Charlotte, NC, USA, to watch the quarterfinals of the Copa America (soccer) between Colombia and Uruguay. (Two details: 1) I always wear my UCLA hat and 2) Soccer games are two halves of 45 minutes each, and at the end when there are delays because of injuries and substitutions, the referee will add some extra time.) Around minute 91, Julia told me: “Dad you are on TV.” I turned my head to the big screen in the stadium but it was too late, nothing there. In the next few minutes, the unexpected happened. Carlos and Silvia, in Montevideo, always record the games of the National team. They recognized me, and they went back to their video, froze the sequences, took three pictures (see Figure 1), and immediately sent them to me via WhatsApp. At that point. Julia and I both started to receive WhatsApp messages from around the world, saying they just saw me at the game, or asking me to confirm it was me.

Figure 1.Three pictures taken by Carlos Tomassino, from the Colombia–Uruguay game (via video) in Charlotte, NC, USA, during the Copa America quarter-finals, on Wednesday 10 July 2024, and sent to Luis Kun via WhatsApp.

(Including Alicia, Neda, and Carlos, Cristina and her family are all from Montevideo; Marcelo from San Rafael, Argentina; Daniel and Mercedes from San Pablo, Brazil; Claudia from Orlando; Ariel and Alicia from Las Vegas. My friend Ricardo was with Pierana, Lucia, Carola, and their families and received a WhatsApp from his son Nacho in Spain saying: “Dad, Uncle Luis is on TV.”) In addition, while waiting for the stadium gates to open, somebody with a phone approached us. We were wearing light blue shirts in a “sea of yellow.” We were just asked a few questions. Without us knowing, this second interview was aired the next morning on a Channel 4 program by Sergio Gorzy in Montevideo (see the video in the Supplementary Material). We were unaware until several friends wrote me the same day to tell me how fluent and with no accent Julia was with her Spanish.

That weekend, EMBS was having the ADCOM meeting in Orlando (Figure 2), site of the EMBC conference. On the evening of Saturday 13 July, all of its members were invited to a fantastic dinner at Shula Steakhouse. Coincidentally at dinner time, Uruguay and Canada were playing for third place of the Copa America.

Figure 2.EMBS ADCOM and EXCOM leaders at IEEE EMBC 2024 in Orlando, FL, USA. Courtesy of EMBS.

As we were approaching the end of the game, I asked a waiter to turn on the TV, so that we could watch the end. Uruguay was losing 2 to 1 at that point. My old-time colleague Nitish Thakor pulled up a chair and sat next to me (Figure 3). We saw together Suarez convert an equalizer and then Uruguay beat Canada on penalty kicks. It was the first time in 44 years that we realized how much we both loved and enjoyed this sport.

At the IEEE Future Directions Committee and 2024 Megatrends Strategy Report, we have defined one of the three pillars as Digital Transformation. Slowly but steadily, Society has become completely dependent on information technology for everything. From banks to hospitals, to gas stations, airports, airlines, retail stores, defense, communications, etc., all areas are interconnected, and if one infrastructure fails, the chances are that all others will collapse as well. On Friday 19 July, CrowdStrike1 by mistake distributed a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor cybersecurity software. This in turn created widespread problems for all of those using the Microsoft Windows platform. That same day, I was supposed to return home but my flight was canceled and so were another 5,400 flights around the world. For the next two to three days, I could not travel and everything was a mess.

By the time I traveled home, I was sick and I tried to isolate myself as much as I could, wearing masks and staying away from everyone. The following day, using a COVID-19 Antigen Home Test, I tested positive for COVID (Figure 4). I immediately scheduled a Telemedicine visit with my healthcare practice and requested the antiviral PAXLOVID. That same day, I started to take it, and about 72 hours later, I was feeling much better (Note the following science and technology advances and the implications of their use: the development of home testing kits, the development of highly effective antivirals, and the availability of Telemedicine as a regular “current” tool (because of the COVID-19 earlier experiences), allowing medical care without exposing others.

Figure 4.COVID-19 Antigen Home Test box by ACON Labs.

Aging provides us the ability to look back and compare different time periods in our lifetime while using technology as a “point of reference.” One challenge is that life moves at a different speed than the development and/or incorporation of these new technologies into our lives. Some of these technologies become part of our professional lives, but we do not realize sometimes the transformation that they may have on our “social life.” From a lessons-learned perspective, balance seems to be the best bet. If you only focus on your social life, your professional and volunteer life will suffer. On the other hand, if you isolate yourself you may become much more productive, but you will miss all the wonderful emotions that will appear in your life when you “connect and share” those moments with others.

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