Before technology devices introduced to the medical industries, doctors perform their medical activity such as diagnosing a patient and the treatment solely with their skill and knowledge they learn. Guglielmo, Wayne J. (1998) article state that in 1920s doctors only utilize basic diagnostic tools like stethoscopes, microscopes, thermometers, and sphygmomanometers. At that period, they use that equipment to listen to the patient’s heart, measuring blood pressure, etc. they focus on patient history and symptoms of diseases.
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Medical treatment become centralized into one place like a hospital after many advanced equipment were invented. However, this creates a problem. Advanced medical equipment is an expensive investment to make whether by hospital or doctors. The impact of this comes to medical bills for the patients.
Wasley, Terree P. (1993) write a paper about health care cost over the past century. In his paper, he states that health care expenditure from government and insurance in 1992 was reaching $830 billion and expected to reach $1.5 trillion in 2000. By looking at what circumstances we knew that medical bills have been increasing from time to time. For some people whose considered wealthy enough was not a problem. Even so for those who are in the range of mid-class and lower for their fortune, it is a big problem. Failed to afford medical payment means that those people are not eligible to be treated. The abundant amount of equipment that is needed to be acknowledged for those people can lead them to misoperate the equipment. Advanced medical equipment in a piece of technology that offers great precision and accuracy in performing a medical task. It was built to do a certain task that has been set. However, It is all up to the doctor to operate those machine. The worst scenario would be harming the patient even more.
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Nowadays, doctors and hospital rely so much upon medical equipment from analyzing, monitoring, and treating their patients. Wallis, Laura (2010) journal report that a patient in Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) passed away due to ‘alarm fatigue’. The patient died because of heart failure, the patient heart rate starts decreasing and after about 20 minutes it stopped.
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An effort to prevent technical failure in medical equipment has been made lately. This includes simulate failure scenario. One example is a study and research from Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma result that Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is one of the solutions to examine safety and reliability of medical equipment (Anon, 2017). This research takes a piece of equipment known as photon radiation therapy to be tested by running the FMEA method to improve its safety and reliability.
In recent year, interesting research regarding medical advancement was utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for medical purposes. The development of AI has helps us to advance beyond the limitation we had before. A complete developed AI is capable to process the information as the same or even more than a human can do. In another word, AI is capable of mimicking the human brain to make a decision based on what is happening. Ting, Daniel S. W. (2018) proclaim in his article that AI is designed to mimic human brain neurons to process information, granting the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Its open huge capabilities of the machine to assist human performing medical task. It is due to the designed machine are able to perform deep learning technique. this technique has been helpful for detecting risk such as cardiovascular diseases (blood pressure, smoking, and body mass index).
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