A leading open-access publisher has released three News and Perspectives pieces that map current disruptions in health tech: a shift in extended reality (XR) toward spatial infrastructure and clinical readiness; a nonprofit AI system scaling pharmaceutical review across Brazil’s public health network; and advances in stretchable edge computing that could free wearables from the cloud.
These reports take stock of how emerging technologies are moving beyond proofs of concept toward real-world deployment—and highlight the institutional, technical and connectivity barriers that will determine whether they reach patients at scale.
## Health tech’s XR moment: from spatial AI to clinical readiness
Reporting from Augmented World Expo USA 2026 in Long Beach, California, physician and XR researcher José Ferrer Costa describes an industry pivot. Investment and development are concentrating on spatial infrastructure—tools and systems that allow XR experiences to be mapped, shared
