When prominent medical and tech pioneers describe surgeon and futurist Dr. Sana Farid as a true leader, visionary, and innovator, it confirms that she is light years ahead of people twice her age.
Despite her youth, shy smile and calm disposition, it’s clear nothing will deter Dr. Sana’s mission to push the boundaries of innovation. Her pursuit is to use emerging technologies including Extended Reality (XR) to enhance the healthcare industry and ultimately make the world a better place.
Named as one of the top 100 voices in XR worldwide, Dr. Sana says her work focuses on navigating the uncharted waters of immersive technologies to research and develop impactful programs.
“My main objective is to turn technology to a good account and break the barriers of physical limitations.”
When she’s not forging ahead as an XR expert, educator, and author, Dr. Sana participates in podcast interviews and presents at the World Economic Forum and other high-profile global conferences, often as the youngest speaker.
Bahrain-based Dr. Sana currently serves as Chair of the Healthcare Committee of the VRAR Association, and is also President of the association’s MENA chapter, one of many in cities worldwide. VRAR, recognized as the world’s largest global community working in immersive technologies like AR and VR, focuses on setting industry standards for the meaningful use of immersive technologies. Dr. Sana explains that advancing immersive technologies, entails ‘creating application standards, designing implementation strategies, defining best practices to help organizations benefit from the technologies and developing initiatives to ensure safe utilization of XR.’
As an entrepreneurial educator, she enjoys creating education and training programs using VR and AR. These are designed to ‘enhance the learning experience by being engaging and bringing lessons to life while providing real time collaboration and assessment.’
In addition, Dr. Sana uses immersive technology like XR in therapeutic programs to improve patient experience.
“XR adds marvelous value to painful therapeutic procedures, we are able to revolutionize patient experience undergoing chemotherapy, burns, and limb loss, she explains.”
While practicing as a surgeon, Dr. Sana realized the need for substantial training and efficient doctor-patient interaction. Already then, displaying wisdom and insight way beyond her years, she quickly grasped how immersive technologies could revolutionize the learning process and break the barriers of physical limitations.
Initiating multiple impact programs − to address issues like infant resuscitation and poor education standards in developing countries – enabled her to’ learn the power of intelligent connectivity and web3 to democratize healthcare and transform centuries-old practices.’
Bahrain will be a key enabler in revolutionizing every industry, adds Dr. Sana. “Even though my journey has been extremely overwhelming, it’s been rewarding. XR and the Metaverse have shown me how small changes can make a significant impact on human lives, even beyond my physical reach.” Dr. Sana is confident that numerous organizations, educational institutions and healthcare providers will benefit from web3 technologies, because they’ll make ‘necessities like education and healthcare available for everybody everywhere.’
Her view of the Metaverse is a universe that combines the capabilities of incredible platforms of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and the Internet to create a physically persistent, collective virtual shared space. She’s impressed by how it accurately emulates real-life scenarios, thus enabling people to connect with the world more effectively.
Encouraged by the emerging ideas and innovations in web3 technologies, Dr. Sana predicts that within five years, they’re going to transform individual lives as experiences and services become more accessible, affordable, immersive and personalized. The convergence of technologies, including the Metaverse, will be a key enabler in revolutionizing every industry, adds Dr. Sana.
As for the medical field, there’s a sparkle in her expressive brown eyes when enthusing how ‘immersive technologies are going to revolutionize every experience in medicine, from medical education to therapy, surgery, and and even pharmaceutical development.’
Dr. Sana is convinced the acceleration of technological evolution technology will allow us to do in the next ten years what we’ve done in the last 100 years. However, she advises that to harness the power of web3 and the Metaverse, we must ‘constantly be open minded and resilient about the changes as they come and be patient with the speed of technology.”
As for the future, Dr. Sana’s excitement stems from collaborative learning and utilizing human capital to enhance life experiences, “I hope to see people aiming to impact more lives and striving to make progress in the best possible manner while feeling empathy for one another.”
“Even though my journey has been extremely overwhelming, it’s been rewarding. XR and the Metaverse have shown me how small changes can make a significant impact on human lives, even beyond my physical reach.”
DR. SANA FARID’S WEB 3 TIPS AND RESOURCES
