Point-of-Care Technologies [President´s Message]

Today, even remote villagers can have access to much more computational power in their cell phones than I had in my laboratory when I started graduate school. I recently participated in the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Special Topic Conference on Point-of-Care Healthcare Technologies in Bangalore, India. As this conference was the first of its kind, its smooth functioning and intellectual success are a credit to Conference Chair Dr. Atam Dhawan (http://pocht.embs.org/2013), who organized a stellar list of world-renowned keynote speakers. Most remarkable is how the point-of-care concept resonates with a wide array of engineers and health-care professionals-spanning both developed and developing nations, for diagnostics, monitoring, and therapeutic applications, as well as coupling sophisticated molecular to behavioral testing with exceptionally low-cost field-deployable devices. Practitioners see the applicability to seemingly all diseases and populations, with impacts ranging from physiological to behavioral interventions.