Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
allow extraction of technological needs in time. These are then considered
as milestones and requirements that have to be met in repeated stages. The
Human++ program of Holst Centre (Gyselinckx et al. 2008) provides an
example of such visionary application programs. Their vision describes a
future world with a large number of visionary devices for medical, sport,
and entertainment applications, which make use of sensors and actuator
systems in and around the body. In a more general context, such minia-
turized network devices might find wider applications in complete differ-
ent sectors to meet different purposes and needs (generic BAN), that is,
agriculture, process automation, and automobile industry. While this is
the case, the underlying hardware platforms necessary for such applica-
tions will be to a great extent alike. Therefore, visionary applications for
each sector provide guidance in defining the underlying technical require-
ments for the different components, such as sensors and actuators, sig-
nal processing, power generation/storage, and wireless communications.
Architectural innovation will then be needed to realize such applications
(van Hoof 2006). Promises, in this situation, in terms of visionary appli-
cations (such as Human++), are used by technology developers to drive
technical requirements, that is, for power generation purposes (to guide
the developments). In a broader context, such prospective projections travel
further and are circulated to others than just technical actors. The picture
with envisioned applications (see Figure 1 in Gyselinckx et al. 2006) is then
picked up by others as a real proposition and materializes a future world
where such applications are used, thus linking up with the broader prom-
ises of Ambient intelligence.
Although these future worlds are communicated as real propositions, there
is a lack of understanding of their eventual impact on society. Consequently,
essential requirements (techno-institutional ones) for such technologies to
become embedded in society are not fed back to the developers of technol-
ogy, which might hamper societal embedding of products in later stages.
This is because stakeholders and other actors use such a future representa-
tion to position themselves and others, and allocate roles and responsibilities
to other stakeholders, which might be contradictory from different perspec-
tives. Subsequently, little effort is made to feed back requirements, which
eventually shape the alignments necessary for the social embedding of the
products to be made.
This gap has been generally recognized before in the literature (Deuten
et al. 1997; Rip and Te Kulve 2008) and has been explained by the fact that
“enactors” (those directly involved in research and development of tech-
nologies) (Garud and Ahlstrom 1997) work with a concentric perspective.
Deuten et al. (1997) explain that in the development of new products, product
managers often view the environment as concentric layers around the new
product, starting with the business environment and ending with the wider
society. They suggest three parts of the environment that product (listed
below) developers seem to consider with a concentric bias.
