The Future of Medical Devices Is in Teamwork

摘要

The power of our future technologies, if we choose to harness it, will not be how well an individual technology works by itself but instead how technologies will work together, with people, at scale. Working together requires a teaming mentality, both within and among the levels of an organization. Only by exploring, experimenting with, and hardening viable human-machine teaming architectures and applying this new knowledge to the design of our medical devices will we overcome the current shortcomings of our sociotechnical systems. To develop these new technologies, priorities will need to shift toward education and investment in new forms of two-way communication between people and machines. We know from our work in systems engineering that the linkages, interactions, and interdependencies between agents are more important than the agents themselves in maintaining a healthy human-machine system.