The World's Most Cutting-edge Personal Technology

For the love of the iPad applications, or a custom shell and light as a cicada's wings of the new notebook, you will praise. Cutting-edge personal technology company Medtronic Medtronic pacemakers production, insulin syringes, and the nerve stimulator. Company CEO Bill Hawkin said the technical level of these devices in no way inferior to Silicon Valley's new invention. Medtronic is a medical technology in the field of Apple's it? "I want to say that Apple is to calculate the area of Medtronic." Hawkins said.

Daoshi no one to be confused with Hawkins and Steve Jobs. 56-year-old Hawkins was born in Durham, North Carolina, about 10 years ago joined Medtronic. Now, he looks more like a regular worship engineer, not a dreamer. However, in August 2007 was promoted to CEO of Hawkins led Medtronic's line of work out of the bio-engineering, expanding to other areas, such as data collection, monitoring, and the implanted device through the analysis of disease. It sounds a bit like science fiction, but in fact this is IBM, HP and other companies have engaged in years of work - but they are not to human body as object.

"Our position is unique, we do not just family therapy equipment company." Hawkins said. "We can put sensors and diagnostic technology into our equipment, so patients and physicians in the treatment of chronic diseases can be better when the interaction."

60 years ago, electrical engineer Earl Bakken founded Medtronic, and since then the company has been engaged in cardiovascular equipment manufacturing business. With the growth slowed down, Hawkins began to expand health information technology. Including Bill George, he is now a Harvard Business School professor of management], led by Medtronic to acquire the company as the main means to constantly enter new business areas, such as diabetes, degenerative disc treatment, nerve stimulation (can be used to treatment of Parkinson's disease), etc..

Hawkins is the second after the management Buchan Medtronic one of the few few engineers, no wonder he hopes his company's scientists to develop a sensation the next product. If Medtronic's technology can work, then the real life rescue equipment, interactive development of patient care and health care will cost a significant impact. With chronic heart disease, for example, the United States for the treatment of the disease each year the cost of almost 40 billion U.S. dollars. The patient's lungs tend to form water, rather they give patients water suffocated. If you can not continuously monitored, and patients often have to go to the emergency, deprived of water. However, if the pacemaker or defibrillator installed sensors, it monitors the situation of water, then when the situation was critical, as long as the BlackBerry or the iPhone through the mobile phone to inform doctors and patients can immediately change the drug use, in order to avoid emergency situations.

Medtronic to add this functionality to their device is still at an early stage in the next few years, some of the equipment will become the size of vitamin pills. It is also with IBM, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and other information technology companies to contact, to enable patients in the future, care workers and doctors to more effectively manage, exchange of various data required. Hawkins hopes that Medtronic and its partners in the field of health care eventually to collect relevant information, from finding a single patient might lead to better treatment, treatment of a cheaper model. "These medical technologies will have a huge data." IBM senior vice president and research director John Kelly said. "We believe that the next 10 years, information technology, one of the most important new use of these devices will be connected, and real-time data generated by screening them."

These technologies may sound not the latest Tablet PC as exciting - and no mobile phone consumers will like the look as fashionable look forward to the advent of the wireless pacemaker - but there is a Silicon Valley counterparts Hawkins incomparable advantages : His company's technology in terms of human existence is almost indispensable.