With tight funding schedules and doctoral students pressured to graduate, there’s a great temptation to skip best practice, and so I can clearly see that similar errors could occur in our field too. Here, such mistakes could lead to more casualties that would probably be more difficult to spot, as the causalities would occur distributed over many health centers with seemingly no connection.
Not enough security research
The Swiss health care system, along with that of other countries, is challenged by growing cost pressure and commercialisation, with politicians and shareholders urging hospitals and manufacturers of medical products to reduce costs and increase services.
Digital health, with remote sensing through wearables, is part of almost every new health initiative; automation and artificial intelligence are the big buzz words. But regulatory authorities still seem to be overwhelmed by the new opportunities, and the much-needed regulation and rule definintion are late in the day. In both sectors, aviation and medtech the authorities are relying largely on manufacturer responsibility and self-declaration, also for manufacturers without experience in this field.
Looking at the research projects in my field, it seems that only a few of them deal with safety, redundancy, risk assessment and usability. Maybe these engineering topics are treated in a cursory manner here because they’re considered to be well-explored, or to have a too applied character. Nevertheless, in digital health we have every reason to investigate many more aspects of these crucial issues.
Acting responsibly
But are we training our students for this? Or do we just encourage them to take risks and jump blindly into the startup bubble, train them in the best data-crunching skills to meet the demands of the job market, and drill them to conduct high-impact research and publish in high-level journals?
The Archimedean Oath
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, inspired by the Hippocratic Oath in medicine, has been drafted for engineering graduates. It’s about being responsible for one’s actions, doing no harm and applying one’s skills for social good. I think it’s time to revive this oath – not just as a document to be handed out with the Master’s diploma, but as an integral part of education and research programmes at ETH, as an example to others. We need more well-trained engineers who will act responsibly in all situations, whether easy or challenging, and it’s time to give them a bigger say in the management of tech companies.