
There’s one 2022 innovation that everyone is talking about and it’s AI. Artificial intelligence has been the talk of the global town for discoveries and innovations of the year ever since AI-driven programs such as ChatGPT, a GPT-3.5 based language model that can be used for writing content, and Midjourney, an image generator, went mainstream during the latter half of 2022.
ChatGPT, which is currently still available for free use, received a whopping 1 million users within the first week following its launch, eclipsing the numbers achieved by some of the biggest social media platforms today and making it one of the most successful launches in tech. With such a brave new world on the horizon, it’s no surprise that AI has overshadowed innovations in other fields.
That said, every field has a new development to bring to the forefront so we’ve rounded up the biggest changes in other niches to let you know about the discoveries and innovations you missed this year.
2022’s Overlooked Developments: Niche Discoveries and Innovations
Automotive

According to Patrick McCann, an automotive expert at WeTryTires, one of the biggest developments in the automotive industry is Michelin’s pledge to have 100% sustainable tires by 2050.
“Creating tires has always been a very energy-intensive industry that relies on heavy manufacturing and has consumed a vast amount of resources,” McCann shared with us, “However, as of only a few months ago, Michelin has now developed 2 brand new tires, one for cars and one for buses, that contain 58% sustainable materials and are approved for road use!”
Michelin produced 14% of the world’s tires back in 2020, accounting for roughly 200 million tires a year, just a few points behind Bridgestone’s 14.6% market share. In an industry where recycling the primary material, rubber, is incredibly difficult, improvements in end-of-life recycling mean a lot of tires saved from landfills and money saved for Michelin.
Healthcare

Dr. Michael May, a medical director at Wimpole Clinic, London, says there’s been a shift from in-person checkups to virtual ones. Once thought of as science fiction or a distant possibility, telemedicine now allows patients to consult with doctors and other medical professionals remotely.
“…[It] can be a convenient option for those who live in rural areas or have busy schedules,” Dr. May explained, “Together with telemedicine, Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will play a more significant role in healthcare decision-making. With better patient monitoring because of these technologies, there are better diagnoses of diseases, more personalized treatments, and better prediction of treatment outcomes.”
A study published in J Ambient Intell Humaniz Comput found that machine learning and deep learning algorithms can now be used to help minimize human error in diagnosis and to make these diagnoses much earlier than they previously could be done. It has so far been applied to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Frameworks for using AI in Alzheimer’s diagnosis take brain scan images and identify patterns found in previous patients that were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The process, which uses neuroimaging data and a deep neural network, is capable of up to “96.0% for Alzheimer’s disease categorization”.

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And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and innovating to provide better patient care,” Dr. May noted, “VR is now used for training medical students as well as in providing therapy for patients with PTSD. 3D printing will become more commonplace in hospitals and clinics. This innovation is used to create custom prosthetics, implants, and even human tissue.”
Kellie K. Middleton, an orthopedic surgeon based in Atlanta, has robotics-assisted surgery on her list of 2022’s big innovations in medicine.
“Robotics-assisted surgery can minimize invasiveness, reduce tissue damage, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. It is advantageous in complex surgeries such as total joint replacements, spinal surgeries, and hip arthroscopies,” Middleton said, “It is advantageous in complex surgeries such as total joint replacements, spinal surgeries, and hip arthroscopies. I foresee a future where regenerative medicine and robotics are standard practices for many treatments, allowing us to provide even better orthopedic care for our patients.”
Psychology

Personality testing is not a field that receives a lot of major changes as innovations in this area of psychology are typically slow, building on older literature while attempting to correlate behavior with cognition. However, with the advent of AI-powered analysis tools, the field of human resources and career coaching is shifting to a more numbers-based approach to finding people’s strong suits and career preferences.
“The biggest discovery in the field of strengths and career coaching this year has been the introduction of AI-driven assessments. AI-driven assessments use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze how a person speaks, writes, or behaves,” Emma Williams, Chief Research Officer at HIGH5 told us, “In education, AI-driven assessments can be used to personalize learning plans and create a more personalized learning experience for each student. Additionally, AI-driven assessments can be used in [mental] healthcare to identify which treatments and therapies will be most effective for a particular individual.”
SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving a site’s visibility to everyone on the internet. If you’ve ever wondered why so and so outlet runs “useless” pieces on fads and niche questions, you have the search algorithms to thank. People search for things and what they search for tells publications and marketers what type of content to release to the web to get a bigger share of the internet’s audience.
Here at A Little Bit Human, we’ve been seeing a shift towards mobile traffic as most of you reading this are currently doing it from your phones. Turns out, it’s not just us. Over 50% of the website traffic worldwide now comes from mobile devices, as per Statista.
In response to this, Google has been pushing mobile-first indexing which crawls, catalogs, and ranks web pages primarily based on the mobile version of its website. As more sites move to fit Google’s new standards, we may be on the verge of seeing a new internet that’s built for phones-first or, if Google stops indexing desktop sites, phones-only.
Real Estate Investing

Since the pandemic introduced people to NFTs, r/Wallstreetbets, and cryptocurrencies, it seems like everyone wants to dip their toes into investing. Leonard Ang, CEO of iPropertyManagement, says recent innovations in real estate investing will make it easier for people from all walks of life to become retail investors in real estate, a field of investing once reserved only for people with serious money.
“While it’s not brand new in 2022, this really has been the year that tokenized or fractional real estate investing went mainstream. Trading platforms like RealT and Yieldstreet have opened the doors to retail investors in this space,” Ang told us, “Meanwhile, high inflation pushed many investors to look for better returns than stocks or bonds could offer, and high-interest rates made large real estate firms hungry for more capital. This all adds up to a big year for this form of investing.”
But Let’s Not Forget the Most Jaw-Dropping Development of 2022 — The Photos Taken By NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope finally sent back its first images of never before seen views of our universe earlier this year on July 13, 2022. The telescope, which was launched in December 2021, conveyed images of the Cosmic Cliffs at the edge of the Carina Nebula where young stars are slowly coming into existence along with other spectacular sights from places lightyears away from where you’re reading this now.
If you’d like to revisit this development, check out Cool Details From the New NASA Webb Telescope Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.