Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Are these lessons here for medical devices? Indeed, if a patient or user can reasonably defeat a
device's intended use (e.g., reverse the flow of inlet and outlet tubes), the designer must prevent this
action. Such prevention should balance the device's intended use with undesired uses without sacrificing
the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the device. This can be a tall order, but human factors are a
reality. Ignoring them is a form of negligence.
Failure
Type
5:
Lack
of
Imagination
Every time something fails, whether a manufactured product (such as a pump or valve leakage) or a
system (such as a protocol for using a medical instrument) it is viewed as an engineering failure. The
job of engineers historically has been to predict the problems that can occur, and to design so as to
minimize these events, protecting people from design errors, natural variability, unforeseen events, and
ignorance/carelessness.
Today this mandate has become even more complicated and difficult. The engineer is now required
to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public from acts of terrorism. Until recently, it had never
occurred to most engineers that they have a responsibility of protecting people from those who would
want to intentionally harm other people or to destroy public facilities intentionally. This is a totally
new failure mode in engineering. Sarah Pfatteicher calls such failures “intentional accidents,” or failures
resulting from intentional actions.
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Engineers now find themselves in the position of having to address these “intentional accidents.”
Military engineers of course have had to design against such destructive actions since the days of moats
and castles but those were all structures built explicitly to withstand attack. Civilian engineers have
never had to think in these terms, but are now asked to design structures for this contingency. We must
ask: “How might my new technology be misused or abused?” and “What must I do to prevent such
misuse and abuse?” Engineers have a new challenge - to prevent such “accidents” on civilian targets
by terrorists bent on harm to the public. The response to this threat requires a two-pronged approach -
technical and social.
BIOTERRORISM:
THE
ENGINEER'S
RESPONSE
There is a distinct likelihood that a number of the designs intended for beneficence will be converted
and adapted for malevolence. Engineers have responded enthusiastically to the call for better technology
to fight terrorism. This effort has included better sensing devices for explosives and weapons, better
communication systems to warn and predict when terrorist activity might occur, better identification
systems for suspect individuals, better ways of identifying explosives and biological weapons, and many
more such innovations. A recent issue of
Prism
, the magazine of the American Society of Engineering
Education, had several articles summarizing technology that can be brought to bear in the fight against
terrorism, and these developments no doubt will have a beneficial effect.
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But the use of such technology
also signals four potential problems.
First, the application of such technology will almost always diminish or adversely alter our sense of
liberty. Witness, for example, the facial identification program used on attendees at a recent Super Bowl.
Despite protests by the manufacturer and the security people to the contrary that such equipment only
