The Profession
by Professor Ian Sutherland, Past Chairman of AIME
Medical Engineering is a multi-disciplinary subject in which there is a need for collaboration between engineering, scientific and technological organisations. Medical Engineering has been identified as a priority growth area both nationally and internationally. The UK with its track record of invention and research in Medical Engineering is uniquely placed to take a lead in a world market that is developing at between 9-10% per annum. Unfortunately there are a number of hurdles to overcome. The UK market is only expanding at 3% per annum, over 90% of the UK medical engineering companies are SMEs and the UK's record of exploiting its good ideas and inventions is poor. It is becoming increasingly important therefore for there to be an effective forum for the exchange of good ideas and initiatives between academia, industry and government if the UK is going to increase its share of this expanding global market.The Royal Academy of Engineering, recognising the potential of this emerging technology, has an established focus group on Medical Engineering, which has brought together a number of organisations concerned with medical engineering including the research councils, government, industry and academia. They have been focussing each year on new areas of medical engineering and have helped raise its profile as one of the major emerging technologies. The formation of the Association of Institutions concerned with Medical Engineering (AIME) is an important addition in the implementation and dissemination of information evolving from this focus group.
It is the first time that so many large institutions have agreed to work together in this way. Its combined membership is over 300,000. "We want to build on the strengths of the individual organisations to achieve more for the medical engineering community than each organisation could on its own". One important aspect of AIME is that its chairmanship rotates annually - in this way we hope that their will be continuous development of new ideas with are large network and membership for the dissemination of these ideas.
As our society enters the new millennium and we face significant demographic changes associated with our ageing population, we anticipate that there will be significant changes in the health care industry and the engineering support that it will require. Tissue engineering, new bioengineering processes and tele-medicine are some of these emerging technologies and there are many more waiting in the wings.
Professor Ian Sutherland is the Director of Brunel Institute for Bioengineering
Document last updated: 2004-12-18