Medicine And Engineering: A Difficult Marriage With Beautiful Children
Dr Joseph Smith MD, PhD., F.A.C.C.
Chief Medical Officer and Chief Science Officer,
West Wireless Health Institute,
San Diego USA
Time: 23 August 2011, 18:00 AEDT (Refreshments from 17:30)
Venue: Meeting Rooms A & B, Engineering House, 21 Bedford St, North Melbourne, VIC 3051
Abstract
The marriage of engineering and medicine is often strained, as representatives of the two parties think and speak differently. They are however, driven by a shared passion to solve meaningful problems, and as a tangible manifestation of that passion, physicians and engineers have worked together to generate many wonderfully effective intellectual offspring.
Pacemakers and Implanted Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs), undeniably the love children of electrical engineers and physicians, now save and improve the lives of millions of people throughout the world. Similar complex marriages have given rise to the no-less remarkable progeny of hemodialysis machines, heart-lung bypass machines, drug-eluting stents, minimally invasive surgical tools, and even heart valves you can now change over a wire.
This presentation will review past triumphs and go on to explore whether there is now a need to revitalise and redefine this relationship, as we now may be less in need of the gifted gadget and perhaps more in need of a wholesale revision of the process of care delivery.
Biography
Dr. Smith holds an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. in medical engineering and medical physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School. He is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has published in the areas of cardiac electrophysiology, has been a consultant to many companies involved in the advancement of innovative medical technologies, and holds a number of patents in the area of signal processing and catheter and defibrillator design. Dr. Smith is also an advisor to various academic and medical organisations including Boston University, Case Western University, University of Miami, Children’s Hospital in Boston, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology and the Johns Hopkins University. In his role with the West Wireless Health Institute, Dr. Joseph Smith leads initiatives to identify and accelerate the sue of wireless health solutions to advance the Institute’s mission of lowering health care costs.