Brian Buntz

March 1, 2016

5 Min Read
10 Highlights of BIOMEDevice Boston

We preview some of the most exciting conference session at this year's BIOMEDevice Boston event held in mid-April.

Brian Buntz

This year's BIOMEDevice Boston event, held April 13-14, will feature a full-day conference track on the second day of the event. The summary below provides a summary of nine of these sessions as well as a short preview of a keynote on the opening day of the event.

Kipp Bradford
1. Why Makers Matter for the Future of U.S. Manufacturing

MIT professor and "Maker" Kipp Bradford (pictured) will tackle the future prospects of American innovation in a keynote on April 13 at the colocated BIOMEDevice and Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in Boston. Bradford suggests that there is much to learn from the recent surge in the Maker Movement, which has already helped change how companies develop products and will potentially help redefine what it means to be an engineer.

2. Designing Medical Wearables That People Want

Wearables are all the rage these days, but there is arguably a considerable amount of hype surrounding the technology and significant problems with user engagement. Many people who buy technologies like Fitbit end up abandoning them within months. At BIOMEDevice Boston, there will be a session that provides advice on how to both extend the functionality of such devices for applications such as chronic disease treatment and to make the technologies as easy and rewarding as possible to use. Greg Caressi, senior vice president of healthcare and life sciences at  Frost & Sullivan has been tentatively confirmed to lead this session, scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on April 14.

3. Driving Patient Engagement

The similar topic of designing products to drive patient engagement will be the focus of a parallel session also at 10:00 a.m. on Led by Kevin Young, senior vice president product experience at Continuum Innovation, the session will consider opportunities for digital health and wearables to help treat and prevent chronic diseases.

4. The Blurring Lines of Consumer and Medical

In this session, Bill Betten, director of business solutions at DEVICIX will discuss a range of products that are straddling the consumer and medical sectors. Betten will consider how these hybrid devices might transform care delivery and provide advice on how to develop products that take the best queues from the consumer and medical sectors.

5. Where Is the Medical Industry's Uber?

The prospect of technologies disrupting the medtech field--analogous to what Uber has done to the taxi industry--will be the focus of a session at 10:25-10:55 a.m. The session will cover the strengths of non-traditional players--often with experience dealing with large data sets--entering the medical space. It will also analyze failures of past and present mobile health devices. This session will be co-led by Sridhar Iyengar, founder, Misfit Wearables, CEO of Elemental Machines and T.J. Parker, CEO of Pillpack.

Biostamp
6. Bending Electronics to Conform to the Body

For decades, the shape of electronics has been largely constrained by the fact that wafers are rigid. The flexible electronics firm MC10 is hoping to change that and, at BIOMEDevice Boston, Nirav Sheth, the company's head of clinical and strategic marketing, will discuss results from the company's new flexible body monitoring patch known as BioStamp research connect. Sheth will also consider potential applications of novel medical sensors and the potential challenges in sensor development.

7. Convincing Hospitals to Buy Your Products

In the past decade, U.S. hospitals have taken a much more active role in buying medical devices while, physicians, frequently hospital employees, have taken a less active role in the process. A session at the conference moderated by David J. Dykeman, attorney at Greenberg Traurig will ask a panel of experts on what hospitals are looking for both in the United States and Europe.

8. How to Keep Medical Data Secure

The pace at which wireless technology is being embraced by the medical device industry is worrying some security researchers as well as the general public, who are beginning to worry that determined hackers can easily breach medical devices or even take a hospital's wireless medical devices offline. A session at BIOMEDevice Boston will consider strategies on how device companies can keep up with the latest data protection measures as well as FDA's evolving guidelines and standards to address cybersecurity. Finally, the session will also consider the important role that HIPAA plays in health data management.

Woodruff
9. How to Benefit from User Research

Design firms often extol the virtues of user research studies and using that to inspire product development--and for good reason: not weighing the needs of your user base is one of the biggest reasons that products fail to get adopted. A BIOMEDevice Boston session will discuss how to apply user research to product development, providing advice on how to use it to guide business strategies. The session will be led by Scott Woodruff, senior industrial designer and program manager of Farm Design and his colleague James Rudolph, who is a program manager at the company.  

10. How to Integrate and Manage Data

The subject of medical data is reminiscent of how the public viewed email two decades ago. Then, it seemed amazing to send a message in a matter of seconds instead of days. The speed of email was also viewed as a boon to corporate efficiency, which could not only cut down on the need to send paper "snail mail" letters but also speed up internal and external communications. But then the volume of email began to grow exponentially, leaving most users utterly overwhelmed.

In the medical realm, doctors had similarly asked for more access to data. Now, they have more data than ever but have difficulty in differentiating what is superfluous and what is important. This session also will provide advice on how to wisely share data.

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