Tech-ing Healthcare into the Future

Medicine has been open source since the time of Hippocrates, when new doctors committed themselves to teaching their art to other doctors. Yet in recent times, as health technology and electronic health care records have become such a fundamental part of how we deliver medicine, we find that we are increasingly unable to share our medical innovations because they are built into commercial closed source software suites. Marcus Baw is a GP, A&E doc, and Health IT specialist and would like to talk about the past and future triumphs and disasters of health tech with you.

Extremely low birth weight babies are moved to specialist intensive care units, on their first day of life, because this improves their chances of survival. These transfers are carried out by ambulance and use special systems that are effectively mobile life support systems. This talk introduces this technology and describes current research, at the University of Nottingham, to improve the babies comfort and safety during the transfers.

Producing materials that can be accepted in the body is still a demanding issue, even in modern medicine. Prof Clare’s research focuses on precisely this, with the use of non-traditional techniques to create surfaces, shapes and materials that the body accepts and allows us to continue with our daily schedules.