CHENNAI: Industry, academia and students should get together to help indegenise instrumentation in healthcare, said Dr S Geethalakshmi, Director of Medical Education at a symposium on Healthcare Instrumentation at Anna University, held on Saturday. “The possibilty of the DME, Health department and NHHID working together to help in indigenising technology and uniting technologists and medical professionals can be looked at. Here government hospitals can be used for clinical evaluation of homegrown Healthcare instruments” she said. The one day symposium on Present Healthcare Instrumentation: Clinical & Technology Perspective, conducted by National Hub for Healthcare Instrumentation Development(NHHID), Anna university saw industry, academia and medical professionals have a constructive debate on the possibilities of working together towards indigenising instrumentation technology. The challenges doctors face in using instruments and prostheses built for foreign body types and sizes, was brought out effectively. The tech specialists shared that there was not enough Antropometric data about human body types and characteristics which would help medical instruments built for Indian peoples characteristics and gait. Not using standard documentation proceddures by different research groups which add to data fragmentation, was also pointed out by them.
Talks on the clinical and technological needs of subjects like orthopaedic arthroscopy, rehabilitation medicine, orthopaedic arthroplasty and radio diagnosis elicited good response from the 50 participants, mostly comprising engineers, developers, surgeons and student participants.
The symposium, conducted by the National Hub for instrumentation Development, Anna University is an attempt at educating both engineers and doctors on the dynamic changes in clinical and technological perspectives of healthcare instrumentation and help work towards indigenous solutions to many current day issues like prohibitive pricing, local technological advances through this symposium, said Professor K Shankaran, Coordinator, NHHID, Anna University.