THE INTERVIEW
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If I wasn’t talking to you right now, what would you be doing?
I would be supervising my undergraduate students in fundamentals of microsystems engineering for biomedical microimplants and discussing project progress with my graduate students.
How did you get acquainted with the medical device industry?
I started with the burning idea to invent things that may help improve the quality of life of people with disabilities. After learning the “basics” of how to make things work, I was excited to accept an offer to establish a laboratory for biomedical microimplants.
What is the best thing about your work?
To wake up every morning in the knowledge that work never will become boring and that students are really interested in learning and using that knowledge in their industrial careers.
What do you think is the most important medical device invention ever?
Difficult question. I think there have been several. With respect to diagnosis magnetic resonance imaging: tomography, and with respect to therapy: the cardiac pacemaker.
What is the most exciting development in your field in the past few years?
The success of neural stimulators in applications such as deep brain stimulation and vagal nerve stimulation. The success rate in treating Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and even severe depression is impressive. The technology could have been realised more than 10 years ago, if the medical interest had been there earlier.
What should people give more attention to?
The “simple” questions. Often, knowledge gets lost or people do not address questions such as “how to make an implant housing hermetic” or “how to connect cables to electronics.” For new applications, these old questions often need cutting edge research to get solved.
What is the most exciting development on the horizon?
Vision prostheses. In the early 90s, almost no one had trust in the research and now the first precision mechanics systems are already in humans and microsystems are close to human clinical trials.
What do you want from your suppliers?
Small numbers of components more easily available for small series medical fabrication. It would also be good if more often competent service persons are available on the phone, who can share their company’s knowledge with their customers and thereby supply the best solution, not the fastest one or the one with the best turnover.
Professor Dr-Ing. Thomas Stieglitz is Head of the Laboratory for Biomedical Microtechnology, Department of Microsystems Engineering, IMTEK, University of Freiburg. Georges-Koehler-Allee 102, D-79110 Freiburg, Germany, tel. +49 761 203 7471, e-mail: stieglitz@imtek.uni-freiburg.de [6], www.imtek.de/bmt [7]. Before establishing the Biomedical Microtechnology laboratory at IMTEK, Professor Stieglitz spent 11 years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering.