Trends in medical technology and BME education

Abstract

Advances in biomedical research and the resulting development of new diagnostic and therapeutic methods, techniques and equipment, has led to a radical change in the way health care is delivered today. Medicine is today strongly dependent on technology and some medical specialties have emerged from these technological advances. Advanced health procedures are more and more carried out by teams, rather than individual medical specialists. Biomedical engineers (BMEs) are the driving force in this extraordinary evolution. The universe of Medical Devices (MDs) includes today thousands of organisations: R&D Institutions, Manufacturers, Suppliers, Competent Authorities and Notified bodies, National and regional health authorities and decision centres, health units, Universities and other Educational institutions, etc. In fifty years the use of MDs has changed radically and their life cycle has been reduced dramatically. The introduction of single use devices led to millions of such devices to be consumed every day worldwide. New technologies are continuously being developed and implemented in fields like robotics, e-health, implantable devices, nanotechnologies. The global MD market is estimated to be more than 300 Billion Euros in year 2016, with more than 500,000 medical technologies registered [1]. Mobile applications are proliferating and the data generated are of the order of thousands of terabytes per day. New specialities emerged to analyse this tremendous amount of data and transform it to useful information.