Current Issue

Dear Readers,

The progress in diagnostics and therapy and a growing awareness of health and prevention has led to an increase in the average life span in Europe from 72 years in the 1970’s to about 78 years in 2006. On the other hand, longer life has led to the emergence of neurodevelopmental disorders and chronic illnesses like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity, cancer, respiratory complaints and others. With the advance of knowledge about more and more diseases, their genesis, characteristics and courses, as well as technological progress in medical equipment, there is hope and–in some cases already a certainty–that Smart Medical Systems have the potential to overcome the emerging challenges in healthcare fundamentally. What do medical smart systems need to perform in order to meet the demands? Primarily they have to serve individuality! There is a desire that a future medicine is to become more and more personalized. Within this frame further requirements depend on which of the areas “prevention”, “diagnosis”, “therapy” or “rehabilitation” should be addressed. This mstnews issue tries to show by means of three examples of miniaturized diagnostic and therapeutic approaches the variety of applications, enabling sensitive and precise diagnostics for a future healthcare which hopefully will be more personalized!
Originally we had intended to promote another topic in this mstnews issue: Advanced Sensor Technology. But as you can see, we have not been able to do so until now. This leads me directly to the crucial point at the moment: the severe lack of time and personal capacity due to other work and priorities, not only at our host company VDI/VDE-IT, but also in the community of the potential mstnews authors, combined with the commonly experienced financial shortcomings left centre right.
This unfortunately leads us to adjourn the regular operation of mstnews for the next time, at least for 2010. We intend to publish another two issues later this year, maybe in September and November, on Advanced Sensor Technology, Energy and Ambient Assisted Living, but we cannot guarantee and fix them yet in the long term. That’s why we do not provide an editorial calendar for 2010 and can announce coming issues only at short notice. Every two months we will issue an e-mailing to the “electronic readership” with new information about mstnews. If you haven’t done already, please register on our website www.mstnews.de to become automatically included in the mailing list! 
Please enjoy it!
I hope you’ll enjoy this issue!

Bernhard Wybranski
Chief Editor

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