You don’t often think of your Smartphone when you think of innovation in the area of medical technology. More and more, though, the devices we all carry in our pockets are becoming indispensable tools in the world of biomedical engineering and for those who work the jobs within its ranks.
Take, for instance, the medical engineering startup that just won a million dollars from Verizon after coming in first in the phone company’s Powerful Answers competition in the healthcare category.
Their startup, Smart Vision Labs, and its product, the Smart Aberrometer, indeed provides a powerful answer to a difficult problem, that is, how to get eye care to those who need it in third world countries.
The Smart Aberrometer, per MedCityNews...
“...uses a phone’s flashlight and camera, combined with an add-on microlens array, to analyze refractive errors. This will make it faster, easier and cheaper for people to get their vision evaluated. The ultimate goal is to get a device in every home in the developing world.”
Outside of the million dollars taken home in this case, the payback for engineering such innovations in the larger context of jobs within the medical profession have been, due to health care reform here in the United States, also seemingly geared to reward those who have new and fresh ideas on how to care for patients.
According to The Medical Device and Diagnostic Indistry blog, the government wants to reward companies in the biomedical engineering field and those holding medtech jobs within it that “can bring down healthcare costs by finding innovative ways to care for chronic care patients.”
Beyond chronic care patients, though, this directive also opens the door for biomedical engineering innovators like Smart Vision Labs, whose Smart Aberrometer points the way towards those with jobs in the medtech field finding more revolutionary solutions for both common and complex medical procedures.
Smart Vision Labs is just but one example of the innovators that will have a chance to shape and heal our world going forward. For those earning biomedical engineering degrees and searching for jobs in the field, you could do no better than enabling your own startup and changing the world with whatever amazing piece of medical technology you dream up.
What recent medtech innovations have impressed you?