INGENIEUR
INGENIEUR
examples of biomedical engineering inventions and innovations include :
● Prosthetics , from dentures to artificial limbs
● Bionic contact lenses
● Bionic exoskeleton
● Robotic and laser instruments to assist in surgeries
● Implantable medical and drug delivery devices
● Medical imaging , such as X-ray and MRI machines
● Radiation therapy
● Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation ( TENS )
● Nanomaterials
● Bioprinting
● Genome editing
Biomedical Engineering Trends Trends in biomedical engineering are constantly evolving . One area is tissue engineering . Tissue engineering and bioprinting allow for living tissue to be made from biologically active cells . With this trend , the artificial tissue produced through bioprinting can be used to create healthy skin for grafting or artificial organs for transplant into living donors . Other biomedical technology examples and trending areas include :
● Organs-on-chips
● Microbubbles
● Transdermal patches
● Wearable medical devices
● Surgical robotics
● Nanorobots
● Medical virtual reality
● Artificial intelligence in medical imaging
● Personalised medicine
Biomedical Engineering Challenges and Prospects – National Library of Medicine ( NIH )
While this instrumentation development project was taking place , the field of Biomedical Engineering was changing radically . The discipline of Biomedical Engineering started with a few random , isolated individuals who took an interest in some aspect of healthcare and clinical medicine . They invented devices to solve specific clinical problems , such as the pacemaker , defibrillator , electrocardiogram ( EKG ) monitors and thermodilution cardiac output detectors . The ad-hoc nature of the field is exemplified by the fact that defibrillators were on the market for many years before defibrillator testers came along . When they did , it was discovered that all defibrillators delivered only about 80 % of their stored energy . That finding raised the question of which energy to report to the operator — the stored energy , which is what all early machines reported , or the more clinically relevant delivered energy . For many years , machines showed both .
Today , you can buy an Automatic External Defibrillator ( thanks largely to the work of Dr Fred Chapman , one of my students ) for a few hundred dollars , and keep it in your home . Another interesting example is the Pulse Oximeter . It was invented in Japan , but the inventor never filed a US patent . The invention of that device holds a lesson for any future device designer . For many years , several companies had tried to extract oxygen saturation information from light shined through tissue . But the presence of other pigments such as myoglobin made the problem complex , and the signals were hard to process because they varied a lot with the heartbeat . A man in Japan named Aoyagi realised that those pulse-related signals , which stymied everyone else , actually contained the solution . The only thing varying was the arterial blood . If he analysed only the changes in light absorption , he only needed two wavelengths . He used the signal that everybody else tried to work around or eliminate .
Simultaneously with these changes , the technology of medical imaging expanded from straightforward X-Rays to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ( now called Magnetic Resonance Imaging because “ nuclear ” sounded scary ), Computed Tomography , and Positron Emission Tomography . There was always something of a separation between these large instruments , marketed to radiology departments , and general biomedical equipment , whose domain was the entire medical care community . But each informed the other to some extent .
50 VOL 95 JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023