Upcoming Technology Advances From The Medical Industry
Medical devices are constantly improving, testing the boundaries of biology and engineering. From diagnostic equipment to joint replacements, eye implants to nerve modulation, advances in biomedicine keep coming.
Companies are closely focused on products that can deliver better, cheaper and more efficient care. Given the oncoming health care reforms, industry is also working with the FDA to streamline what many consider to be an excessively complex approval process. The FDA has unveiled the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC), a new public-private partnership, in order to develop improved and streamlined evaluation procedures for medical devices.
What are the best emerging technologies? Here are a few of top advances coming down the pike.
Good news for many of us, better headache relief is on the way. Cluster headaches are severe, debilitating and currently incurable. Autonomic Technologies has investigated a way to electronically block pain by stimulating a facial nerve bundle (SPG). A small implant is permanently embedded near the SPG bundle. When a headache begins, the patient simply turns on a hand-held device to activate the implant and block the pain.
Telemedicine is about to expand to the individual hospital bed with remote presence robots like the ambulatory, wireless RP-VITA, produced jointly by iRobot and InTouch Health. The robot can navigate hospital hallways autonomously, and it contains a two-way video screen as well as monitoring equipment that allows a physician to remotely see, hear, talk and monitor their hospitalized patients.
With needles to monitor sugar levels and more needles to deliver insulin, a diabetic patient is stuck with being stuck. Echo Therapeutics replaces the needles with transdermal patches that can continuously monitor sugar levels and wirelessly send the results to a remote center for instant feedback. Echo’s transdermal insulin delivery system is also needle-free.
Melanoma is a skin cancer that is very hard to treat. The best approach is prevention, which is why many of us visit our dermatologists for mole evaluations and biopsies. Although a large percentage of these biopsies are done on harmless moles, we continue doing them because the biopsy is the only diagnostic tool available. MelaFind, created by MELA Sciences, gives us another option. It is an optical scanner that analyzes irregular moles by matching the scan against a registry of melanoma images.
Open-heart surgery is currently required to replace heart valves. The surgery has a significant recovery time, and it cannot be performed on the very ill. The Sapien transcatheter aortic valve, however, can be placed via the leg artery, threading the valve through a catheter up to the heart. Aortic valve replacements without open-heart surgery can save lives and reduce both morbidity and cost.
Do these device advances sound like fascinating work? It is challenging, and the results are highly tangible. Biomedical engineering is now a field of study in its own right, and universities offer bachelors, masters and doctorates. In general, master or doctoral training is recommended, because the work is heavily research oriented.
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