• Question: If you could improve one element of the technology you use what would it be?

    Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Good question… hmm…

      I might change the technology we have to see nanoparticles and characterize them. Although we have great technologies to do this, including Electron microscopes, it would be great if there were one technology that could do it all – tell how big the particles are, what they look like, how many of them there are, and if they have anything attached to their surfaces!

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I would make one software system that we could use for everything we do.

      At the moment we have several systems and not everyone knows how to use them all.
      If we had one, everyone could learn to use the same thing and this would help us tremendously.

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      One of the questions I’ve been asked by hospital staff is when we will design a “self-cleaning bed”. A very important part of hospital care is making sure that everything is clean and not able to transmit infection between patients and around the hospital. That means we have to make beds that are able to be cleaned easily by the medical carers looking after the patients – this means designing products to have smooth edges and nowhere dirt can get trapped. If we were able to come up with a bed that could clean itself however, that would make nurses’ jobs so much easier and faster and mean they could spend more time looking after the patients.
      If anyone has any ideas of how to make a hospital bed clean itself, please let me know…

    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Ooo, let me think… at home or at work??
      At home I would like my house to be cleverer. Lights should turn on and off when I’m enter/exit rooms. My thermostat should be able to tell when I’m in and adjust the heating accordingly. Everything should be wireless so that there aren’t so many cables around. I should be able to press a single button in the evening, that would turn off everything that isn’t needed at night to save energy. It’s all feasible! Just not standard yet…
      At work I would improve our ways of modelling the human body, as we’re not quite there yet.

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      For my PhD studies, I developed a vibration device. A vibration device for improving muscle strength.
      I asked our volunteers to use the vibration device and I recorded their muscle activity.

      But for recording muscle activity you need to stick electrodes on people’s legs’/arms’ skin. Electrodes do not do any harm but they are not comfortable, also there are lot of technical issues in recording muscle activity from the persons skin, these electrodes come with wires (wireless electrodes are expensive).

      I would have liked to have electrodes which are tiny, provide excellent signal and are wireless. May be this type of electrodes will become available in the next 10/15 years.

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