Recently released from the CERT Division of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, there are 10 technologies emerging in the next five years with the greatest vulnerabilities in terms of cybersecurity, finance, personal health and safety.

Ten. But relax. Only two of the technologies directly impact the health care industry:

Augmented reality

Smart medical devices

Christopher King is the vulnerability analyst at CERT who, with his colleagues, came up with the top ten after examining more than 2000 emerging technologies. They compiled their findings in a report called 2016 Emerging Technology Domains Risk Survey. Originally prepared in 2015 for the Department of Homeland Security United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the report provides a snapshot in time of the current understanding of future technologies.

Here’s what it says about the two aforementioned items:

Augmented reality allows providers to see a live direct or indirect view of a physical environment augmented by computer-generated sensory input – sound, video or graphics, for instance. Medical professionals must be able to trust the output of AR systems when using them to perform medical procedures.

Smart medical devices are biomechanical machines that interact with the human body in an inpatient or outpatient context. As more devices are connected to hospital and clinical networks, patient data and information will be increasingly vulnerable, as will the risk of remote compromise of a device directly connected to a patient. An attacker could theoretically increase or decrease dosages, send electrical signals to a patient, or disable vital sign monitoring.

The other eight at-risk technologies on the list are:

Connected home (automation of home devices)

Enterprise 3D printing (additive manufacturing)

Networked telematics

Autonomous machines (such as smart robots)

Smart sensors

Commercial unmanned aerial vehicles

Vehicle autonomy (driverless cars)

Vehicular communication systems

To read more about all the items on the list, go here.

To stay on top of the emerging and current technologies that affect your health care organization, turn to PrivaPlan. PrivaPlan President David Ginsberg frequently speaks on these and other technologies and their risks and returns. Last week he spoke to participants at the Western Health Care Leadership Academy in San Francisco.

Contact us at info@privaplan.com or call 877-218-7707.