“(Biomedical engineering) will continue to have a huge impact on healthcare. (T)oday it is the fastest-growing area of engineering.”—Wellcome Trust (UK), in announcing their $65 M 2010 Medical Engineering Initiative.
It is widely recognized that this impact will continue to grow as our society faces ever-increasing pressures due to demographic changes [1]. As one example of this growth, primary total knee replacements are predicted to increase from 430,000 in 2005 to a “staggering” 2.2 million procedures by 2030 [2]. As the Wellcome Trust noted, technological innovation will play a key role in our responses to those pressures. But while it is true that advances in healthcare technology are ultimately driven by fundamental advances in technical fields, such as imaging, molecular biology, nanoscale and microscale device fabrication, and materials science, these advances only become innovations and have an impact through a complex product development process...
