Presenter: Stephen Wilcox, PhD, FIDSA
The presentation starts with a summary of the changes that have taken place in healthcare, particularly with medical devices, over the past 30 years, then provides predictions of what will happen in the next 30 years. Medical care has changed dramatically; many of the procedures that we take for granted today didn’t exist 30 years ago. Changes in healthcare have relied upon general technological developments, so, to predict what will happen in the future, it’s necessary to predict what will change in technology. It seems likely that many present developments will continue—e.g., better computing power, smaller miniaturization, etc. The difficult part is to predict the radical changes to be expected in the future. The final challenge is to figure out what the role of industrial design will be in healthcare.
