hands. Including people. We had MIT instructors and Harvard
doctors at our constant beck and call (It doesn’t get better than
that!) There were a lot of medicine related doubts that cropped
up over the week – but each team had a doctor, so things were
cleared up instantly. What usually may have taken us a few days
of Googling to
figure out, were answered in mere minutes. Doctors don’t always know what problems engineers
may be able to solve, and engineers don’t always know what problems the medical world faces.
This is the gap that this workshop bridged effectively - they put an engineer and a doctor in a
room together and truly created magic.
Health technology has a whole new meaning in India. We don’t need things to just be convenient and sophisticated. We need all that and we need it to be as cheap as possible. One of the
main problems we face in our country is that people can’t afford healthcare. And the government
spends peanuts (4.1% of total GDP as opposed to over 10% spent by most countries) on healthcare. This really puts things in perspective for all those thinking “Which problems can we solve?”
Ask anyone about the top five problems they face – you’re bound to have “health” (of either
themselves or someone they love) on the list. And it is our duty to solve this problem.
That one week at IIT Bombay brought out the best in me. As Ramesh Raskar (one of the
people responsible for putting together an event of that magnitude) said at the workshop – “The
paranoid survive, the anxious thrive.” We should be paranoid about medical technology, and be
anxious to see it pan out. We say things like, “I can’t believe telegrams were the fastest mode of
communication. How could people have lived before the Internet? It seems so primitive.” There
should be a time when people say “I can’t believe people used to prick themselves and extract
blood to find out what’s wrong with them. How could they have tolerated it? It seems so primitive.” And this time must come soon. Like yesterday. (That’s my attempt at paranoia)
.
Pooja is a final year
student of Electronics and
Communication Engineering.
Pooja believes in a green
environment and prevention
of cruelty to animals. Pooja is
also an ace dancer and pursues
photography as a hobby.
“They put an engineer and a doctor in a room together and truly created magic”
The Shoreline
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