As an engineer or any professional device person, you need to keep track of the trends in your field. Personally, for me, I tend to have a 30,000 ft view of the entire medical field, so I can give you some basics of what everyone is thinking as a whole, but not too much in-depth for one particular area, like orthopedics for example.

In this class we may have some people that can do that. Pick a field. If you do not work in industry, it can be any device field (ortho, cardio, neuro, etc.) If you do work in industry, you can use your current field. Tell me what you think the trends are in those fields as far as device design, usage, treatments that are coming out, US vs. EU, etc.

Here’s some overall stuff I see personally:

More companies are going to the EU first because the regulatory hurdles are easier there. However this will flip flop dramatically as soon as the new EU Medical Device Directives come out and actually make it harder to get a device approved in the EU compared to the US. A giant reversal will happen.

Antibiotic releasing devices are popular in theory, but difficult to get approval and most companies shy away from them.

Pretty much every surgical device out there is moving toward less invasive forms.

Growth-factor or biologic based devices are still in development but have experienced some setbacks and have a ways to go.

3-D printing is all the rage and it’s only a matter of time before approved devices really start to use it.

What else?