Currently, providers create medical devices as complete and insulated environments to deliver services for practitioners and patient.  But, we are reaching a tipping point where we can evolve devices beyond their monolithic entity and deliver services using a set of physically separate modular components.   Moving forward, we should be able to deliver a modular platform for devices in the drug delivery services where the components behave in a collaborative manner and can interoperate with or w/o human intervention.  We can impat a sense of self-awareness where they can adapt to changing environmental conditions as well as data from other devices and system (including the patient …).

Here’s a working example of how independent devices (non-medical) have been used to demonstrate this self-aware behavior.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/siftables.html

A few questions to consider

What if….we could leverage this technology (or the concepts embodied within) to design a new medical device ?

What if…all medical devices were designed with this self-aware capability ?

How would this technology address some of the desired outcomes for nurses in a critical care setting in a hospital ?   Imagine if we could apply this to alternate site locations (like a patient’s home)…