Monthly Archives: April 2011

Dear reader,

Though I have tried to be virtually present as much as possible, I am currently neither in Delft nor in my hometown Leiden. This also explains the late hour of this post. Where I am, it is currently a little over 6 pm. I am in Medford, a small forensic town near Boston, MA, USA. The main reason for being here is twofold. First, as Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I, I participated in the annual IEEE Panel of Editors (PoE) meeting. Second, I am here to give an invited talk at Tufts University in a seminar hosted by Prof. Sameer Sonkusale.

During the PoE meeting, we discussed a lot about good and not-so-good EiC practices, about upcoming changes to IEEE Xplore, about plagiarism (which, unfortunately, becomes more of a problem), about journal performance metrics, etc. The latter is also very important to you. That is, if you (plan to) make scientific, design and engineering contributions and you (plan to) present them in a journal or at a conference. And if they contribute to your reputation as a researcher, scientist, designer or scholar. For this, our busy chairs, heads and leaders, more and more resort to the only thing they understand about your work, being "the number"; more specifically, the Impact Factor (IF). I will not bother you with the exact definition of IF; many people do not even know and don’t care, your boss probably included, but it is generally considered to be a measure to express your importance, or the importance of your publications, or the importance of the journal that you publish your work in. Whereas it purely counts incoming citations without considering the significance of those citations.

Since the algorithm for computing the impact factor is simple, it is also simple to manipulate. And this is exactly what is being done constantly, by authors, who for this reason include a lot of self-citations in their manuscripts, and by journals that impose a lot of self-citations (to the journal) on their authors. Since this is seriously blurring the reputation of people and journals, but also the minds of our evaluators, more objective figures-of-merit have been discussed, the most elegant one probably being the Article Influence. If you are interested you may wish to (and if you are a boss of a scholar or a scholar yourself, you probably should) check out http://www.eigenfactor.org/.

After the PoE meeting, I took off for a walk in and around the city center of Boston, called The Freedom Trail. See http://www.thefreedomtrail.org/. The Freedom Trail was recommended to me by Menno (as of now honorary member of the BME group) and, according to the web site, is "a 2.5 mile red-brick walking trail that leads you to 16 nationally significant historic sites, every one an authentic American treasure." And indeed it did. And I believe it also guides you through some of the most beautiful places in Boston. If you ever happen to be around, check it (and the Guinness from one of the Irish pubs) out!

Today I changed hotels and I am currently in Medford, where I will be staying for the coming two days, as tomorrow and the day thereafter I will meet various students, professors, heads and deans of Tufts University and give two presentations on Electronics for Wearable and Implantable Medical Devices, discuss possible opportunities for collaboration and discuss some latest research results that both Sameer Sonkusale’s group and the one of yours truly are working on.

So what about electrology, then? Well, today I went for a walk in the town of Medford and I came across a sign that advertises the services offered on 82 Forest St. Among them those of an Electrologist. So what does he or she do? Well, the sign reads on with the name of the therapist (which I will not disclose here) and the name of his shop: "Hair it go’s!" The service? Permanent Hair Removal. So if you ever wonder whether I may be getting bold, don’t you dare. Signing off with a famous phrase of Senad: "The things we do for science…."

Wouter

Yesterday evening I returned from the workshop "Visions towards ICT Supported Health", organized by the Hermes Partnership, with very mixed feelings. Don’t get me wrong here; the workshop was reasonably well attended and well organized with lots of interesting talks, but I cannot help myself thinking back over and over again to the pictures sketched by a.o. Felix Harpe and Piet Verhoeve of the healthcare and wellbeing crisis the world is facing today. And almost all governmental bodies and insurance companies are just sleeping on it!

To make it a little more concrete for you; the population is graying all over the globe, not only in western Europe (as I initially thought), with some countries lagging only a little bit behind, such as those in Latin America, Africa and China; the latter catching up quite rapidly, by the way. Soon there will be more people that are either not yet working (as they are still in their nappies, at school, etc.), have retired already or are chronically ill than there will be people that participate in the work force.

As a consequence, healthcare costs, already the highest expenditure of governments, are likely to increase dramatically as the population ages. This will either lead to higher taxes, if the government is willing to sustain its role in providing healthcare, or to a reduced government role in providing health care. In both scenarios we will live longer, but poorer, either moneywise or healthwise.

Another effect of the graying population is on education, currently the second largest expenditure of most governments. These expenses will tend to fall with an ageing population, especially as fewer young people would probably continue into tertiary education as they would be in demand as part of the work force.

In the Netherlands, we used to have and still have one of the world’s best pension systems. However, our pension system is also experiencing sustainability problems due to the increased longevity. Even by going to a retirement age of 67, the extension of the pension period due to our longevity will not be in the right balance with this extension of the active labour period.

On top of that healthcare costs will rise, not only as more people will require healtcare, but also as more specialistic care will be needed to deal with the whole spectrum of diseases. On top of that, relatively new diseases, e.g., caused by obesity, such as Diabetes Type II and Hypertension, are on the lookout for more victims. According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 65 (!) percent of American adults are overweight or obese.

About 10 years ago, Taeke van Beekum, lecturer of the course Healthcare Systems (ET4-128) and working at TNO Prevention and Care, showed the group of interested students the changing demography of the Netherlands and already predicted many of the above. At that time, it was already quite late to take anticipative action by making regulatory changes and starting the development of new products for healthcare and wellbeing. Now, after 3 more governments, this action is still not taken and I am afraid we are simply too late. And the worst is still to come, in about 15 years. The Mayas indeed made a calculation error. Doomsday will not be in 2012, but in 2026.

Wouter