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Solomon C. Nwaneri, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Lagos.  E-mail: snwaneri@unilag.edu.ng Medical devices are invaluable to medical practice. The numerous innovations in the development of medical devices has led to significant improvement in healthcare services including diagnosis and treatment. Simple and complicated medical procedures are now performed across different hospitals globally leading to a decline in mortality and morbidity rates. These procedures cannot be done without the use of medical devices. Although, many medical devices are mostly used for disease diagnosis, others are used for therapeutic purposes as well to treat patients. The defibrillator is a typical therapeutic medical device which can be used to revive a person who suffers from a heart attack. While some medical devices are extremely cheap and affordable for example, an oral thermometer costs as low as $1. Some other medical devices are very expensive and unaffordable. For example

Solomon C. Nwaneri, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria. E-mail: snwaneri@unilag.edu.ng Health technologies are generally manufactured in the highly industrialized countries of the world. Most often, these technologies are often designed with existing realities in developed countries without due consideration to the peculiar realities of developed countries. Many developing countries are generally poor and lack the resources to provide basic and advanced health technologies in most of their hospitals. Most often, they rely on donations of obsolete and fairly used medical devices from developed countries. These medical devices may not be very suitable and workable in these resource poor countries. Most often these equipment easily fail and become unusable after a short while. Hence health technologies need to be appropriate, suitable and relevant to the local environment.  Appropriate Technologies as defined by th

Solomon C. Nwaneri, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Lagos, Nigeria. E-mail: snwaneri@unilag.edu.ng Biomedical instrumentation involves the use of measuring systems  to solve problems in humans and animals.  Humans and animals do get ill or sustain injury and need diagnosis and treatment. With the help of medical instrumentation systems, the presence of some physical quantity could be determined helping physicians to make better diagnostic decisions and judgement. In a world plagued by multifarious diseases, the benefits of biomedical instrumentation systems cannot be over-emphasized. Hence, it is imperative to have a good knowledge of how a measuring system works, as this knowledge is needed in the design and development of medical devices and equipment.  There are primarily five major components of medical instruments. They are: 1. Measurand   2. Sensor 3. Transducer 4. Signal conditioner 5. Display System THE MEASURAND  The measurand simply refers to the phys

Solomon C. Nwaneri, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Lagos, Nigeria. E-mail: snwaneri@unilag.edu.ng One of the direct benefits of the Internet is its ability to remotely link people across the globe seamlessly bridging geographical barriers. The healthcare sector has immensely benefited from the transformative power of the internet through the innovations in telemedicine. Telemedicine is the provision of medical services across a long distance. Telemedicine makes it possible for accurate diagnosis of the health condition of a person even if there is no qualified medical expert around him or her.  Of course, this is generally believed to bring about a number of benefits such as increased access to healthcare services, a reduction in costs and even a decline in mortality rates.  There has been a considerable rise in the use of telemedicine services across the world after the devastating effects of COVID-19 pandemic. The US telemedicine market size is projected t