As digital health technologies rapidly move from concept to practice, questions about what the future of healthcare will look like, and what it will mean for people living with life-limiting illness, are at the centre of many conversations.
For Timothy Ryan, Palliative and Supportive Care Education (PaSCE) Manager at Cancer Council WA, those questions came into sharp focus last year at the Oceanic Palliative Care Conference. Across presentations and conversations, a shared theme emerged: tools once considered theoretical are no longer on the horizon, they are already here.
Technologies such as digital twins, AI-enabled wearables and advanced communication systems are beginning to reshape care. In fact, one large national home-care provider is already equipping clinicians with smart glasses, enabling a live video feed to a central command centre so specialists can provide real-time guidance during in-home care.
Digital twins take this innovation a step further. By synchronising physical health data, emotional wellbeing and biomarkers, clinicians can test interventions on a virtual version of a person before applying them in real life – a development with profound implications for personalised and palliative care.
It was in this context that Timothy met Lok, an Occupational Therapist whose work has continued to resonate long after the conference ended. Wanting to explore how these emerging technologies are being used in real-world palliative care, Timothy later sat down with Lok to record an episode of Keeping up with the PaSCE podcast.
In Keeping up with the PaSCE - Episode 19: AI, MND and Creating What Matters Most, Lok explains how he uses emerging technologies to support autonomy, dignity and connection for people who may otherwise lose their ability to communicate.
Lok's work begins not with technology, but with conversation. He meets with individuals and families to understand what truly matters to them – their core values, meaningful memories and sense of identity. Through a short series of structured interviews, he can generate a voice database large enough to allow a person to continue communicating once speech is lost. Remarkably, this process can take as little as 20 minutes to create an exact copy of a person's voice, with enough data to generate words that were never even recorded.
Beyond voice banking and synthesis, Lok also works with immersive technologies to recreate personal memories from individual descriptions. These experiences can then be revisited using eye-gaze and wearable devices.
The conversation explores tools such as wearables, voice technologies and digital twins, and what they can offer people living with life-limiting illness. Importantly, these technologies are not about replacing care. they are about providing access.
For Lok's patients, this means communication can extend beyond the physical limitations of the body, and self-autonomy can still be upheld.
As technology continues to advance, the challenge lies in ensuring innovation remains human-centred and grounded in what matters most. What Lok describes is not science fiction, but a future where technology supports need rather than distracting from it.
Palliative care is about helping people live with purpose, even in the face of life-limiting illness. When used thoughtfully, these emerging technologies can help make that possible.
