IT Affects Our Quality of Life

IT has significant implications for our quality of life. The workplace can be expanded from the traditional 9-to-5 job at a central location to 24 hours a day at any location.

IT can provide employees with flexibility that can significantly improve the quality of leisure time, even if it doesn’t increase the total amount of leisure time.

From the opposite perspective, however, IT also can place employees on “constant call,” which means they are never truly away from the office, even when they are on vacation.

In fact, surveys reveal that the majority of respondents take their laptops and smartphones on their vacations, and 100 percent took their cell phones.

Going further, the majority of respondents did some work while vacationing, and almost all of them checked their e-mail regularly.

Improvements in Healthcare

IT has brought about major improvements in healthcare delivery.

Medical personnel use IT to make better and faster diagnoses and to monitor critically ill patients more accurately.

IT also has streamlined the process of researching and developing new drugs.

Expert systems now help doctors diagnose diseases, and machine vision is enhancing the work of radiologists.

Surgeons use virtual reality to plan complex surgeries. They also employ surgical robots to perform long-distance surgery. Finally, doctors discuss complex medical cases via videoconferencing.

New computer simulations recreate the sense of touch, allowing doctors-in-training to perform virtual procedures without risking harm to an actual patient.